DIYbanter - View Single Post - Is it *really* that rewarding to be stealing residential airconditioners?

dpb

On 7/8/2011 10:21 AM, wrote:
On Jul 8, 11:05 am, wrote:
On Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:21:21 -0500, Matt

....

They sell the copper at 75 cents a pound ...

....

how much copper do you wind up with? Even if it's
25lbs, that's a whopping $20

They don't do just one and clean Cu tubing is over $2.50/lb even in
under 50 lb walkin and it's been much higher than that.

The "pros" take the units somewhere and strip them then sell;
sophisticated bunches they've busted around here have crushers/sorters,
the whole shootin' match just like the big chop shops have everything
they need for dismantling cars/trucks for the black market parts market
or to disguise/retitle/etc. the vehicle on the "steal on commission" basis.

It's a major problem; having rural electric co-op that traverses much
open country that is very sparsely populated, we've lost miles of the
ground wires from poles and as others have noted even some places they
have actually tied on and pulled the lines themselves.

There's been a bunch in Wichita that have targetted a couple of the park
ballfields during offseason--they've done 10X the damage to light
standards, switching gear, etc., that the cost of the materials has
been. The real ****er is a couple of them were all-volunteer
contributed neighborhood fields.

New more restrictive laws on the recyclers on what they have to have for
ID and materials they can take have helped a little; enforcement on the
crooked ones of them is a problem in lack of resources altho it's fairly
easy to tell which are the most problematical there's still the effort
to actually make sufficient of a case to prosecute at a serious enough
level to do real damage instead of just nuisance level...

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