I have a friend who is a project manager for Seattle's largest mechanical contractor, a company which does billions of dollars worth of construction projects annually. He is intimately familiar with project costing and scheduling, since that's his job, and he told me the other day that they are starting to just use stainless pipe everywhere because now it's cheaper than copper. Seems absolutely incredible to me.
He also told me of a recent service call he flagged. A major hospital called saying that their air conditioning had stopped working. He took some guys out and they went up on the roof to look at the unit. Thieves had stolen the entire huge condenser and scrapped it out for the copper.
Yep, they tangos riped out all the coper from a frozen foods company in my complex. $40k in damages for a couple hundred in scrap copper. Paint the copper?
In the Vancouver area they are throwing ropes over rural power lines and pulling them down from the poles. The need for drugs is strong. Local authorities are cracking down on scrap dealers who accept anything from anyone. They are revoking their business licences. Last time I remember this copper price madness was during the Vietnam era. The economy was juiced up and people were dying. Deja Vu. Randy
He also told me of a recent service call he flagged. A major hospital called saying that their air conditioning had stopped working. He took some guys out and they went up on the roof to look at the unit. Thieves had stolen the entire huge condenser and scrapped it out for the copper.
No, aluminum is about as popular with thieves as copper is. I am preparing several boxes of scrap brass and copper to take to the recycler.
My brother is building a new house an the plumber used plastic tubing and compression fittings instead of copper or iron pipe. Goes in fast and any leaks are easy to repair!
SAN JOSE, Calif. ? Supply and prices for copper continue to be a major concern for the electronics industry amid an ongoing labor strike at the world's largest copper mine.
Union workers at BHP Billiton Ltd.'s copper mine in Chile extended a strike for the 16th consecutive day on Tuesday (August 22) after rejecting the company's latest offer to settle the dispute, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Copper prices have soared since BHP (Melbourne, Australia) shuttered the world's biggest copper mine over two weeks ago. The world's biggest mining concern also ended negotiations with union workers, who have been blocking roads to the Escondida site, according to the report. The mine in Chile supplies 8.5 percent of the world's copper.
For some time, there has been a major concern for the soaring prices of copper, which is used for chip interconnects, lead frames and a multitude of other applications in the electronics industry.
The soaring price of copper and other raw materials over the last few months has forced network communications and coax cable maker Andrew Corp. to recently add a steep surcharge across many of its products.
Prices for copper have doubled in the past year, due in part to huge demand in China. Copper is also used for wire and pipes.
And prices are increasing again after spiking in May. By May 10, copper prices on the London Metal Exchange, a major metal market, hit a whopping $8,148 per metric ton for spot-market cash buys, up 79.5 percent from $4,537 per metric ton at the beginning of January. Prices for three-month contracts, with copper delivery slated for July, climbed to $8,005 per metric ton, up 82 percent from $4,397 per metric ton on Jan. 3.
This week, copper prices are all over the map. On Monday (August 21), copper jumped 2.8 per cent to $7,695 a ton in London, according to the report.
Copper for October delivery on the Shanghai Futures Exchange jumped 2.3 percent to $8,565 a metric ton in China, according to the report.
Soaring copper prices could hurt potential strategies at various companies. For example, Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc. (Fort Washington, Pa.), a maker of wirebonding equipment, is working with customers to evaluate copper wire bonding and to compare the results to wire bonding with gold, the traditional material, the company revealed in its third fiscal quarter financial results.
With gold costing more than $600 per ounce, and having followed an exponential curve to double in price in the last four years, it is no surprise that packaging companies are considering lower cost alternatives. Now, it's unclear if K&S will move forward with copper.
Just so you know, there was/is NOTHING wrong with aluminium wiring. The problem had to do with using cheap substandard connectors NOT the aluminium wire, AND it was the very powerful copper lobby that saw the opportunity and legislated more affordable and BETTER aluminium out of the market place. I would point out that ALL those big transmission lines bringing power to your shop are aluminium, and I'm not aware of any problems with them "failing". I think you will also find that Canada....and the rest of the world does use aluminium wiring WITH proper connectors and there is NO problem. It's about power and politics NOT product.
Last week here in Greenville, SC, a power company worker found a guy lying dead under the (hot) wires, next to a sawed-down power pole. Next to the body was a bow saw, and some wire strippers. And they say Darwin was wrong!
King County Library System has been losing outdoor bronze sculptures to scrap hounds. They've lost several and have heard from the county that it is losing plaques and sculptures at alarming rates. Some scrap dealer(s) in the Puget Sound area must be buying without asking questions. They've even been stealing the bronze bears from Brown Bear car washes (not artistically important, but beloved by local kids).
My guess is it's just the latest fad amongst addicts. A few years back it was CD's and before that it was car radios. Anything that can be turned into drugs quickly. Seems like scrap metal would call for more energy than most addicts I've known could manage, but I've never spent much time around tweakers, who are reputed to have manic energy along with their paranoia.
I've seen the recent pricing on 250' roll packages of 12/2 WG indoor romex wire priced at about $92, and the price of these rolls was about $30 as recent as about 2 years ago.
I noticed the big jump in price shortly after the change to the yellow jacket for 12 gauge romex wire. I'm fairly sure that the last roll I bought over a year ago was priced at about $30. In previous years the price was fairly steady around $25-$27 retail per roll.
Someone had mentioned that some agency/entity has determined that we'll expend all of the known copper sources by the year 2050, IIRC. I think this comment was made at about the same time that someone else was trying to find an easy mechanical method to separate his copper pennies from the zinc ones.
There will be adjustments in nearly every industry, if that comment is true. Certain applications will adapt by using other metals, no doubt. Some conductors can be aluminum, others can be plated steel. Plastic tubing replaces copper in many applications.
Prices of wire for machine installations, mig wire (has a thin coating of copper), torch tips, wire terminals, rivets, hardware, semiconductors, tubing and fittings, brass alloys, instruments and appliances that contain wiring or circuit boards, will affect the pricing of metalworking supplies that many RCM'ers use in everyday practices.
Landfills have had countless tons of copper thrown into them every day, and I doubt if any of it can be recovered.
I can't comprehend how job estimators can quote big jobs these days. The prices of metals and other materials have been jumping erratically in the past several years.
Higher values in "copper bounty" will result in more copper being recycled, but it's probably unlikely that the prices of domestic copper products will stabilize or decrease, due to the vast increase in development on other continents.
WB metalwork> I have a friend who is a project manager for Seattle's largest mechanical
For reference those power lines are ACSR, aluminum clad, steel reinforced. They also use connectors that are a lot more specialized than residential ones.
While politics are part of it, it's not like the AL companies are tiny and powerless either. The ultimate issue is the fact that while both AL and copper can be perfectly safe and useable, it is easier and less demanding to get safe connections with copper than with aluminum.
With copper you just wrap the wire around the terminal and tighten it down, with AL you have to be sure to have a CO/ALr rated device, clean the wire, apply anti-ox compound, tighten the connection and then retighten the connection a month or so later.
One big difference between the US and those other countries, is US homes are very likely to contain an armed occupant who will take issue with someone trying to purloin his/her property.
But more importantly, the unlimited economic opportunity in this country makes it a better bargain to earn what one wants, than to risk life and liberty stealing it. The cost/benefit ratio is stronger. Which means our thieves are more stupid, theirs more desperate.
I read an interesting post or blog or something sometime back (might have been here) which compared the US attitude toward law vs the prevalent view in a latin American country. It basically said that United States citizens consider laws as absolute, but the latins considered laws as guidelines, not absolutes. With that attitude, petty theft is no big deal. I believe this was attributed to Catholic doctrine somehow. Anyone recall that?
........... The problem is that many homes are unoccupied for 8-10 hours per day while everyone is at work. The same was true in Brasil. While I was there, the "trick" was to take small children, typically 6-8, strip and grease them, and force them through the window bars into the "secure house," where they would unlock the doors. Rumor was that they were starved to keep them small and skinny. Several of the families I visited had a Rotweiler or Doberman, but it was standard practice to feed the dogs quick acting poison, then slip the kid through the window bars.
Two problems here. This is true for fewer and fewer people, and some people would rather steal than work. Indeed, the effort they expend to steal is frequently several times what they would expend if they worked, but it is the principal of the thing.
The most dangerous person in the world is the one that feels they have nothing to lose.
======================== And therein is the problem.
With the big influx of immigrants comes immigrant attitudes, and daily the traditional American respect for law is eroded by the spectacle of post dated stock options, pension fund raids, eminent domain seizure of individual property for corporate benefit, corporate "bust-outs," etc. The rapidly increasing perception that the "law" is only a suggestion and not a requirement, is not the result of any Catholic doctrine, but rather the inevitable result of the universal appreciation of Leona Helmsey's famous legal doctrine "Laws are made for the little people."
We are all now well and truly down that slippery slope where no ones' property and person is safe. Unka George (George McDuffee) ============================= When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter," in Esquire (New York, Sept. 1935; repr. in By-Line Ernest Hemingway, ed. by William White, 1967).
The victim was a 36 y.o. from the town of Liberty, not a known hotbed of drug activity, but meth has become a major issue here, so who knows? OTOH, this is the rural South, where a person's last words usually are "Hey, watch this!" (I know, 'cause I lived next door to a whole family of them - less and less with passing time - for 23 years.)
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