High price of 600 amp circuit breakers?

The new ones are the one with a little thing in the middle with tyhe amp number, that is separate from the case, right? Like a little depressed button.

They could easily sell for $150-200, it seems, at least a half of wat I have if not more. Gotta look at them more closely.

i

You should look at this site. Talk about high powered breakers, and this one failed. The movie is totally awesome.

Click on the MPEG video movie titled "NEW MPEG of a 500 kV disconnect switch, one phase opens hot!"

According to DeepDiver :

I've seen those. Ouch!

According to Ignoramus5533 :

Yes, but does that feedback say you're a reliable supplier of useable/working high amp breakers? _That's_ what's meant by "good reputation" in this context. eBay reputation is somewhat irrelevant in this context.

Well, it says that I do not sell bad things by claiming that they are good things.

i

Industrial customer do purchase used, sometimes that is the only place they will get what they need. There is a huge difference in large frame breakers. Most are rebuildable. There are lots of aftermarket companies that offer springs and contact kits for a lot of the popular old breakers. As long as you have the personnel and equipment to do the testing after the rebuild there is nothing wrong with a 15 year old breaker that is tested after a rebuild. Most larger cities have several companies that specialize in just this function. I just sold a bunch of GE Magnablasts and cells to a factory in the east. Each breaker was produced circa 1977. The are of the

15kv varity and 1200-1600 amp frame. Each breaker weights in at a svelte 2350 pounds. They wanted to do an expansion and did not want to change breaker types. They will refurbish these and add new trip units. Installation of the cells will be over their Christmas shutdown. Sure glad it is outside my service area.

Higher amperage breakers especially the medium voltage types can have lead times of 20 plus weeks.

We will also be removing ~22 GE 2000kva transformers soon. 12.47kv to 480 or

208 3 phase 4 wire. Can I put you down for a few? Got 3 utility transformers coming up. 69kv to 12.47kv any one interested? Oil samples were taken, I do not have the results yet.

Yeppers, that stuff has a cottage industry around it. Better to pay $1000 to a rebuilder, than to pay $6,000 for a new one with a MSRP of $11,000.

If I can sell mine to a rebuilder for $200, I will be happy as a clam.

i

According to Ignoramus21085 :

It means you're basically honest, but it doesn't mean that you can reliably assess the condition of these breakers. You can't test them.

Best you can say is "good/clean condition, contacts apparently good, manual actuator works".

Industrial users of such equipment will not buy such gear. Even a guarantee is not going to help, because they can't risk it failing and taking something very expensive with it. Hell, for the most part, it'll cost them more to install it than you could sell it for.

Rebuilders are your best bet, and they won't pay much.

Yep. That's what I will do. I will say something like "Demolition takeout from a working system. Clean. Checks out with an ohmmeter, turns on and off with manual switch". Or something like that.

Well, what would they pay, in your opinion?

i

Please check the mounts before mounting on a grounded surface. Some of these breakers have to be put on glastic so the terminals will not arc.

The bigger the breaker the less of a muliplyer there is. All depends on the volume your doing with the supplier.

What part of the country are you in? Maybe I can give you some numbers or names that will help in the money mission. You will need to be VERY specific with these folks. Model, manufacture, frame size, trip unit/size, mounting, voltage, poles just to get started. Detailed pictures help as well.

Agreed.

I am in Northern Illinois. I am going to unload and clean these breakers and will ptake photos. Some are 600A, some are 400A, some are motor breakers, etc.

i

You don't mention a lot of details, but in addition to all the other comments, I would add that you have to remember not all 600A breakers are the same.

The phase-phase voltage can be different, and more importantly, the interrupting rating. Depending on the service, it may have to be able to interrupt short circuit currents in the 10kA range, or as high as 500kA. Some old units used to have sand-fuses built into them. The breaker would open for modest faults, but if the fault current was *really* high, the breaker would just arc/weld until the sand fuses blew. They had a much higher interrupt rating.

Point is, once you get larger than the average residential service panel, there is more to a breaker than just the full-load current rating. Inverse time tripping curves, Very Inverse times, high interruption ratings, even whether it's meant for AC or DC.

daestrom

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Of course not, even if they were made of solid silver they wouldn't be that expensive.It's their usage destination that makes them expensive.If you have a load of 600 A then it's most probable that you own a factory and that breaker will supply something very expensive with electricity, not a kettle or a tv or a dvd player.And of course the manufacturer will ask more money from the factory owner than the average housemaid.

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At 15A not, but at what voltage?The average power station pump motor is rated 1MW power which even at 6.6kV is 140 A.To interrupt that current, you need either vacuum relays or contacts immersed in oil breakers or SF 6 breakers.Even a simple 16 A domestic breaker is a very sophisticated device, having contacts made of special alloys, a magnetic and a thermal tripping devices and an arc extinguisher, to cut of large currents (in the range of kA).The average factory substation is ~16 A ,medium voltage and you need special fuses, as big as a human forearm with an interrupting capacity of

250 MVA, for 20 kV line voltage, for such usage.

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Do you mean, say 2 euros for a 16 A (13 cents each A) and 11000 euros for a

600 A (18.33 euros each A)?But 16 A breakers, of course as a poster mentioned are produced in batches of millions while 600 A in batches of hundreds.

Multiple pole breakers are widely used in very high voltages, equal or above than 220 kV.

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That's right, but I am wondering, who would be buying them?Industrial motors with a power equal or above than 300 kW usually come cheaper in the 6.6.or

3.3 kV version than the low voltage one, and I can't think of any single load (or combination of loads) that will draw such a large current.Even if you have say 1000 computers it would be idiotic to power them from a single breaker, because if it opens all 1000 comps have a blackout.

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Easier would be a dummy load that would draw that amperage at the nominal voltage of the breaker.

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Actually, I've seen the results of a disconnect switch opening not only hot, but under nominal current.This happened at the utility substation, which supplies half the city of Iraklion.The said switch was under nominal current (1500 A at 15 kV) and the shift manager ordered the opening of the switch, not distributing the current beforehand on another switch or opening the line circuit breaker.The result was of course a huge arc, that destroyed the switch, blasted the switch metal cover, blackened all the breaker hall walls, and burned the eyebrows of the 2 emplyees that were doing the operation before catapulting them off the hall.