Copper value estimator.

Profile your lot

Pick the closest material type, enter the weight, and choose the condition. The estimator profiles the lot into a value tier and tells you what moves the offer in your favor. It does not — and cannot — give you a price: Ironcrest does not publish per-pound prices, and any number here would be stale before the ink dried.

What the value tiers mean

The estimator sorts lots into tiers that mirror how buyers actually think. Top tier is bare bright wire — clean, stripped, unalloyed copper at its purest commercial form, straightforward to verify and the first thing every buyer wants. Strong tier covers #1 copper: clean tubing, bus bar, and solids — real copper, real weight, minor handling marks allowed. Mid tier is #2 copper and insulated wire: genuine copper value with processing ahead of it — solder and paint to account for, jackets to strip or recovery percentages to estimate. Alloy tier is brass and bronze: priced as their own categories, bronze typically above brass on copper content, both routed to brass mills and foundries rather than copper refiners. A mixed lot is evaluated as a blend of what is in it — and in practice, as its lowest grade, which is why sorting is the fastest upgrade available. Condition then moves you within the tier: sorted, dry, honestly described lots verify fast and earn the stronger end; dirty, oily, mystery-pile lots carry a verification discount because the buyer prices in the unknown. None of this is a price — it is a map of where your lot sits and what would move it up.

See it in action

Take an electrician's van cleanout: 120 lbs of stripped bright wire from a commercial rewire, 60 lbs of clean copper pipe with the brass fittings cut off, and a bucket of mixed insulated drops. Run as one lot, the buyer sees a blend and prices defensively — the insulated drops and any questionable pieces set the tone. Run as three described classes — bare bright, #1 tubing, insulated wire — each earns its own tier, the photos tell a clean story, and the quote reflects confidence instead of caution. The sorting took maybe half an hour with side cutters. That half hour is routinely the highest-paid time in the whole transaction. Now the honest limits: the estimator cannot see your material. It does not know that the "clean tubing" still has soldered joints (that is #2), that the "bare bright" is actually copper-clad steel (the magnet test would have caught it), or that the insulated cable is aluminum inside (strip a section and check). Garbage in, garbage out — the tool is only as good as the description you give it. When the real quote happens, verification is physical: eyes, magnet, scale, and often an XRF gun.

About the do-the-math box

The optional math box exists for one reason: you may already have a figure in mind — a yard's quote, a number from a friend in the trade, last month's deal — and want to see what it means at your weight. Type in your number and the tool multiplies it out. The page suggests no figure, ships with no default, and holds no placeholder: the input is blank because any number we printed would be our number, and we do not publish numbers. If you do not have a figure, leave it blank — the lot profile is the useful part. And remember what the math cannot do: it cannot grade your material, cannot account for contamination, and cannot see the market move between now and the sale. A computed total is arithmetic, not an offer. The offer comes from photos, weight, grade, and today's market — which is exactly what happens when you send photos for today's price.

Copper questions, answered.