FURNACE & BOILER TEARDOWN YIELDS

Open the blower door of a typical gas furnace and you are looking at the money first: the blower motor sits in the squirrel cage at the bottom, and its copper windings are the single richest component in the unit. A standard PSC motor in the 1/3 to 3/4 horsepower range carries roughly 1 to 2.5 pounds of copper. Newer ECM motors are smarter and lighter — figure roughly half a pound to a pound and a half of copper, plus a control module that rides along with the motor pile.

Up top, the draft inducer motor is the small one that starts every heating cycle — a fraction of a pound of copper, worth the two minutes it takes to drop it. The gas valve is the brass stop: a cast brass body in the half-pound to pound-and-a-half range, and it belongs in the brass bucket, never the steel pile. The control board and wiring harness round it out with 1 to 3 pounds of insulated copper wire across the unit. The heat exchanger and cabinet are the weight of the unit, and they are steel — real tonnage over a season of changeouts, graded as steel, and the reason a whole furnace still has whole-unit value even before you pull anything.

And when there is an air conditioner attached.

Most furnace changeouts share the job with a split AC system, and the evaporator coil plus the copper line set carry their own copper — a typical 25-foot line set holds roughly 4 to 6 pounds. Refrigerant recovery is certified work under EPA Section 608, and it stays with the licensed side of the job; once the system is properly recovered and the coil is out, the copper-and-aluminum coil is valuable, clean scrap. Keep the coil separate from the furnace steel and it grades the way it should.

A boiler swap is a piping job, and the piping is the yield. The near-boiler copper — supply and return runs, the expansion-tank connection, the manifold work — commonly frees up 5 to 25 pounds of copper pipe on a residential changeout, and commercial headers run far heavier. The brass family comes with it: zone valves, flow checks, air vents, pressure-relief and fill valves, and the fitting tailpieces — several pounds of brass on a typical residential swap, sorted into the brass bucket where it belongs.

The circulator pumps are the motors of the boiler room: each wet-rotor circulator carries roughly half a pound to a pound of copper windings, and some models pair that with a brass volute in the 1 to 2 pound range. The aquastat, controls, and low-voltage wiring add a light tail of insulated copper. The boiler sections themselves are cast iron or steel — heavy, honest weight that moves as steel, and the reason a full boiler-room cleanout fills a truck faster than any other job in this guide.

Sell it whole when time is the bottleneck.

A whole furnace or boiler still carries every pound on the table above — the buyer does the teardown and the unit prices as a unit. On a slammed changeout day with the truck already full, whole is the professional call: one stop, one load, nothing picked apart on a customer's driveway.

Pull first when the unit is already open.

The pull-first list is short and fast: blower motor, inducer, gas valve, harness on a furnace; circulators, brass, and copper piping on a boiler. It is about fifteen minutes with tools you are already holding, and it converts one blended unit into three clean grades — copper, brass, and motors — that each price on their own merits. Keep the three buckets separate on the truck and the sorting is done before you ever reach the scale.

My rule from the buying side of the scale: if you touched it with a wrench anyway, pull it. If getting it out whole is the win, sell it whole and let me do the bench work. Either way the metal is worth a call at 312-880-8174 — text a photo of the pile and I will give you a number on it.