Normally I would put the old one out by the road and it would magically dissapear over night. Then it dawned on me why.
Since my buddy is going to help me pick up the new one with his truck and the scrap metal yard is nearby I thought I’d take the old one there myself.
What can I expect and what should a knowledgeable grill scrapper know so as not to be taken advantage of? FTR, the cover is made of stainless (I assume…it’s shiny and doesn’t stain!).
I think most scrap yards have a mim amount before they will pay. I think it is 500 pounds. A gas grill will be mixed metal which will get you the lowest price.
What ever you do with the old grill, keep the old tank as a spare. It’s always good to have multiple tanks. It’s a lot easier to swap out the tank with a full one when you run out while you’re cooking* then to have to run to the store to grab a new one. Then, when you have time, get the empty tank filled (or swap it, whatever you do in your neck of the woods) and now you have another full one ready to go).
As for the scrap value of a bunch of steel, cast iron, aluminum, and plastic that you haven’t sorted, I’d guess you’d get about $3-$5 for the whole thing, maybe less. If you dismantled it all, maybe $10. Those scrap guys make their money by filling up the entire bed of their pickups (or minivans), then spending all day taking everything apart and sorting it out and bring it all to the different scrap yards that pay the best price for the different types of metals. Plus, they’ll wait until the price goes up. It tends to fluctuate from day to day.
It’s probably less work to just let them do it then to try to get that filthy grill into your vehicle and end up getting your clothes covered in grease for a few dollars.
*You’ll probably never run out while the grill is just sitting idle in the garage.
I’d say about $5 too. At work, I take a small dump truck of steel to the recycler every week or two. I can’t remember the prices but it goes by weight and we get $1-300 depending on how dense the load is. I’d say a dump truck load of grills would be on the $100 end so yeah, a single grill might be $5.
You are way off. With scrap prices the way they are scrap yards make a killing on small purchases.
Using my experience of investigating many scrap metal thefts the $5 price is about right. If you break it down yourself to the various components I’d say its probably going to be $15-20 depending on how many brass fittings it has.
Last year I scrapped a large shaking water bath that I purchased from my University surplus house. It was mixed metal, but also a fair amount of stainless steel. It was a heavy bugger (somewhere around 80 pounds), maybe about the same size as your grill.
I got about $25 for it (I paid 2 dollars at the surplus house). I keep my eye out for similar items now.
Does a magnet stick to it? If it does it is a stainless steel finish which won’t get you much. So unless you can rehab the innards the built up crud and tasty flavors are destined for the landfill.
Why are scrap prices so high? Have we hit peak iron or something?
I’m not sure of the reasons why. I just know prices shot though the roof a couple years ago. Particularly nonferrous metals such as copper. Metal theft also shot through the roof.
I hauled off an old car a couple of weeks back and the price was $7.60/100# as “light shreddable”.
I took the rear end from an Infinity G-30 in a couple of months ago.
It was well over a hundred pounds.
I got 7 bucks.
Put it by the road for the scrappers.
I just checked the price for “mixed scrap” at a salvage yard near me. It’s $165 per ton.
I’ve been there several times over years, but won’t go there again. Recently it’s long lines with some very sketchy people selling copper wire and bronze plaques. (Wonder where they got that.)
Set it at the curb.
I had a new cooker fitted recently. The fitters took the old one outside and within half an hour it was being loaded into the back of a pickup by some big guys in vests and jeans.
My old car that I drove to the scrap yard made £160.
You have to balance the scrap value against the labour.
The recyclers we use say it’s demand from China. I did a quick google and the stories I see say it’s demand from China and other emerging markets, plus we’re producing less scrap too.
There are stories about scrap skyrocketing from 2004, 2008, and 2010. I only remember 2008, we were really raking in the dough when we went to the recycler with a dump truck full of aluminum back then. Since then it seems like it’s been pretty steady, but maybe that’s just in my area.
Thanks!! … I think I’ll wheel it out to the road.
The only scrap buyer I know of takes aluminum, copper and lead, but no steel. A thirty-gallon garbage bag full of aluminum cans weighed about 9lbs and got me five bucks.
It may be worth it to remove the brass fittings first.
Check google. A lot of the scrapyards around here post their current prices.
FWIW I had just the lid of a gas grill stolen. This was within walking distance of a scrap dealer. The lid may have been alluminum.
I brought a 150 pounds of mixed iron/steel, and got $5 (as much as it cost to drive it to the yard). The grill won’t get you even that.
I once got rid of an old shed on Craigslist, and the guy I gave it too had a huge van, and waits till he fills its to bring it to the yard. He’s the kind of guy that would collect several grills and other junk from the side of the road to help fill his van.
If you lived in a nickel-deposit state, you could have gotten $12 by redeeming them.