How to Sell Your Scrap Metals and Make Money on Your Home and Yard Clean-Up
Posted on: 14 October 2016
As you clean up your yard and home to get rid of unused, old, broken items, take a second look at some of them to make sure you are not throwing away a metal with value. Items containing metal that may seem like trash can be worth money when you sell them to a recycling or other type of salvage and junk yard. Here are some tips to help you sort out items around your home that contain metal that is worth money.
Sell and Recycle Old Vehicles
If you have allowed a broken-down vehicle or two to sit idle in your home's yard, there are several ways you can get some money for them. First, if you want to sell your vehicle to a scrap or junk yard for its parts, the junkyard will usually come and tow the vehicle off your yard for you. Besides the metal parts in the vehicle, the junk-yard operator can sell engine belts, seats, lights, and even tires, as long as they are in working condition. A junk yard can make quite a bit from your broken-down vehicle by selling it off for just its parts.
If you have several vehicles and are fine with some disassembling work, you can pull some parts from your vehicles. For example, your vehicle's catalytic converter contains platinum and could contain cerium, manganese, nickel, rhodium, and palladium. Make sure you are only checking inside your old non-running vehicles that are powered by gasoline and diesel if you want to find a catalytic converter. Vehicles that run on electricity or natural gas do not need a catalytic converter, as they don't create the pollution regulated by one.
Then, be sure to pull off any circuit boards from your vehicles, as the circuit board's connectors are gold plated. You can usually find a circuit board on your vehicle's computer, which is located under the dashboard on the passenger's side of the vehicle. You can also pull the circuit boards from a CD changer, audio system, or navigation system. Each circuit board is located just behind its electronic component in your vehicle.
Sell and Recycle Tools, Appliances, and Scrap Metal
Any old lawnmower, weed eater, snow blower, garden tiller, clothes washer and dryer, and other similar home and yard tools and appliances can often be sold to repair shops for spare parts or for repairing and reselling. It is a good idea to call around to some local repair shops and retail shops to find any that will pay for these items. Often, the repair shop will pick up the item from you and pay you cash.
You can also sell some of these old mechanical items and appliances to scrap yards. The scrap yards will pay you for many types of metals that come on old and unused tools and appliances. In fact, most refrigerators built before 2001 contain more than 100 pounds of steel that can be recycled at a scrap yard. The scrap yard will break down the metals from items, sort them, and then melt them down and recycle the metals so they can be made into new items again. When an aluminum can is recycled, it can be recycled into new aluminum on the store shelves in as quickly as 60 days.
If you are not sure what type of metals your broken, old, or scrap items are made from, you can do several tests to determine this. If your metal is magnetic, it is steel. Steel also rusts very easily, so if your metal has sat outside in the weather, it will usually show signs of red-colored rust.
If a magnet does not stick to a metal, it is a non-ferrous metal, such as aluminum, copper, brass, and bronze. You can tell whether a metal is copper, as it will be red or brown-red in color. Sometimes as copper ages it begins to show a greenish residue on its surface. Aluminum is a lighter metal that is usually white or light-silver in color. You can bend aluminum very easily with your hand. Many old door knobs and hinges are made of brass, which is quite heavy and bright yellow in color. Then, bronze is a dark-brown colored metal with not very much sheen.
Use this information to help you score some cash off your used vehicles and old metal and appliances. Talk to a company such as Big Daddy Scrap for more information.
Share