THE COPPER NOTE

What copper did this month.

I keep a standing page with the latest on copper prices and what is moving the market — that is where the fresh numbers live, updated regularly: today's copper picture. My read, in plain language: copper keeps finding reasons to stay interesting. Mines have had disruptions, tariffs have buyers positioning early, and data centers plus the power grid keep eating more of the stuff every year. When the metal is in the news, your bucket gets more interesting. That is the whole market lesson for this month.

Featured guide: Where Copper Hides in Your Home.

This month's featured guide is Where Copper Hides in Your Home — the room-by-room copper audit. Wire in the walls, pipe under the sinks, the AC line set, the motors in the appliances you are about to haul to the curb. Read it with a flashlight and a trash bag, because you are going to start seeing dollar signs in your own basement. Homeowners have called me after reading it and finding a coil of old wire they forgot they had. That is the guide doing its job.

The 15-pound coil.

Here is the math I want every apprentice to learn in year one. A standard 250-foot coil of 12/2 Romex — the stuff you pull through half the houses in America — holds about 15 pounds of copper. Fifteen pounds, in one coil, before you strip a single inch.

Now think about a rough-in. The home runs, the switch legs, the mis-cuts, the ends you trim at every box. On a whole house, the cutoffs add up fast — and that is before the panel upgrade where you pull out the old service cable, or the basement finish where the demo pile goes in the dumpster. Every one of those ends is copper you already paid for, sitting in a bucket.

Most crews split the bucket. That is the tradition, and it is a good one — but only if somebody actually does something with it instead of letting it sit in the garage for three years. Weigh it. Keep the bright stuff separate from the burnt stuff. And when the bucket gets heavy, that is what the phone call is for.

One thing I learned buying scrap: the whole-house repipe.

This month I bought the copper out of a whole-house repipe. Here is what actually comes out of the walls when a crew repipes a house: a truck bed of copper pipe — mostly Type M and L — plus elbows and couplings, plus a separate bucket of brass valves, shutoffs, and old shower bodies.

Two lessons from that job. First, keep the brass separate from the copper. Brass is its own grade and it is worth real money on its own — mixed in with the copper, it just drags everything down. Second, the crew split the bucket three ways and every guy walked away happy, because none of them had to make a second trip anywhere. I came to them, the pile left the same day, and everybody got paid. That is how I want every one of these to go.

Fun: guess the weight.

Picture a laundry basket heaped with Romex ends, short pipe stubs, and a tangle of ground wire — the classic end-of-job pile. How many pounds of copper is in there? Most guys guess high on the wire and low on the pipe, or the other way around, and almost nobody nails it.

Here is my number for a basket like that: somewhere in the 40-to-60-pound range, depending on how much of it is heavy pipe versus light wire. If you have a pile at home and want to play for real, take a photo, guess the weight, and text it to me at 312-880-8174. Closest guess without going over gets bragging rights in Issue 2 — and if your pile is real, I will give you a real number on it too.

I watch the copper market every day because my business lives on it. I read the guides we publish because I write half of them. And every month something happens at the scale — a weird lot, a seller story, a market move — that I wish more people knew about. The Copper Note is where all of that goes, published right here where anyone can read it.

New issues land roughly once a month in the Friendly Guides library. No email, no signup, no account — just come back and read. And if you ever have copper to sell, you already know the number.