Copper Scrap for Plumbers: Grades, Prices and How to Sort

If you're a plumber or heating engineer, copper is your single biggest scrap earner, by a long way. A working plumber pulls enough copper off jobs in a year to net £1,500–£3,500 in scrap income alone, and that's before you add in brass, cylinders, and boilers. But only if you handle it right.

The difference between "sorted properly" and "thrown in a bag" is genuinely about £600 per tonne at current prices. On an average year's copper scrap for a busy plumber, that's £300–£500 in your pocket that most of your competitors are throwing away.

Here's the proper guide to copper scrap grades, current prices, and the sorting shortcuts that actually matter. ## The grades, simplified

Yards use a load of different terms for copper grades depending on where you are in the country and how the yard was set up. Ignore the jargon, there are really only three grades that matter for plumbers:

1. Bright copper wire (Grade 1) Bare, unoxidised, clean copper wire. No insulation, no coating, no solder. This is the top grade. Most plumbers don't see much of this unless they're also pulling out old mains cable. Current price: around [INSERT CURRENT PRICE]/tonne

2. Heavy copper (Clean Grade 1 / "#1 copper") Clean copper pipe with no paint, no solder, no fittings. This is what you get when you take a length of copper pipe straight out of a wall and cut it clean between joints. Also includes clean copper sheet and clean copper cylinder bodies. Current price: around [INSERT CURRENT PRICE]/tonne

3. Braziery copper (Grade 2 / "#2 copper") Copper with solder joints, paint, fittings attached, or other contamination. This is what most plumbers' scrap actually looks like when they chuck it in a bag without sorting. Current price: around [INSERT CURRENT PRICE]/tonne

There's typically £600–£800 per tonne difference between heavy copper and braziery. That's the margin you're playing for.

What the grades mean in real money

On a typical load of 20 kg of mixed copper from a couple of weeks' work:

• Unsorted as braziery: ~£6.40/kg × 20 kg = £128
• Properly sorted, 15 kg clean, 5 kg braziery: (15 × £7.20) + (5 × £6.40) = £140

Twelve quid on a single bag. Doesn't sound like much until you do it twenty times a year: £240 extra for about an hour of cumulative sorting time. That's a £240/hour effective labour rate on the sorting, better than anything you'd charge a customer.

On a big job (a full boiler swap with cylinder change, say, producing 30+ kg of copper), the gap opens further. Sorting matters more the bigger the load.

What counts as "clean" vs "braziery"

This is where most plumbers trip up. The line between clean copper and braziery isn't always obvious and some yards are stricter than others.

Clean copper (heavy grade): - Copper pipe cut cleanly between joints, no solder residue - Copper pipe with the solder joint cut off - Clean copper sheet - Copper cylinder bodies with fittings removed - Old copper roof sheet (rare but occurs)

Braziery copper: - Copper pipe with solder joints still attached - Copper with paint, lacquer, or coating - Copper with brass fittings still attached - Copper that's been through fire (burnt copper) - Copper with any visible contamination - Microbore pipe (usually braziery because of the way it's joined)

The rule of thumb: if you can run a cloth down the length of the pipe without catching on anything, it's clean. If it catches on a fitting, a blob of solder, or a rough patch of paint, it's braziery.

The sorting shortcut that actually works

Nobody has time on a live job to sit and sort copper with surgical precision. Here's the realistic system most profitable plumbers use:

On the job: two bags in the van. - Bag 1: "straight copper", any length of pipe you can cut clean without much work - Bag 2: "bits", everything with fittings, solder joints, offcuts too short to be worth trimming

At the end of the week: spend 15 minutes with the tin snips or a small hacksaw. - Take the "straight copper" bag and double-check it. Cut off any solder blobs you missed. - Take the "bits" bag and triage. Anything where the fitting is big and the copper tail is short, leave it in the braziery bag. Anything where the copper tail is long enough to cut clean, cut the fitting off. The fitting goes in the brass bag (it's usually brass anyway).

The payoff: 15 minutes of work per week moves maybe 20–30% of your "braziery" scrap up to the heavy grade. Over a year that's £200–£400 extra for an hour a month of sitting in the van with the radio on.

Brass fittings: your second-best earner

Every plumber generates a stream of old brass fittings, compression elbows, tees, isolating valves, bib taps, radiator valves. Most of it gets thrown in with the copper and graded down to braziery, or (worse) chucked in the skip because "it's only small."

Brass is currently around [INSERT CURRENT PRICE]/tonne, roughly £3.50–£4 per kg. A jam jar full of old brass fittings easily weighs 2–3 kg. That's £7–£12 that most plumbers throw away every couple of months.

Keep a separate brass bag from day one. At the yard, it gets weighed separately and priced at the proper rate. It costs you nothing to do this and it adds up faster than you'd expect.

Old copper cylinders: the single biggest scrap item in your week

An old Fortic or vented cylinder pulled out of a boiler swap can weigh 15–25 kg depending on size. At heavy copper prices, that's £100–£200 for a single cylinder, more than most of your smaller jobs earn you in labour.

Handling tips: - Drain it before moving. A cylinder half-full of scale and water is twice the weight and a pain to lift. - Remove the immersion heater and any brass fittings, they come off cleanly and go in the brass bag. - Leave the copper body whole, yards will grade a whole cylinder at heavy copper rates without needing you to cut it up. Don't waste time sawing it into pieces. - Check for asbestos lagging on older cylinders (pre-1985). If the lagging looks fibrous or chalky, that's an asbestos risk and the cylinder becomes a specialist disposal job, not a scrap yard job. Modern foam lagging is fine.

A good plumber doing one boiler swap a week and keeping every cylinder is adding £5,000–£10,000 a year in cylinder scrap alone. It's the single most overlooked earner in domestic plumbing.

What about the bits you can't identify?

Every plumber ends up with a mystery bucket, odd bits of alloy, random fittings that might be brass but might be zinc, bits of chrome-plated something-or-other. Here's the fast way to identify them:

• Magnet test first. If a magnet sticks, it's ferrous (steel or iron), low value.
• If no magnet: scratch it with a knife. Bright yellow metal underneath chrome plating is brass. Dull grey underneath is usually zinc or pot metal (low value). Bright orange-red is copper.
• Weight check: lead is the heaviest common metal. If something feels far heavier than you'd expect for its size, it might be lead.

When in doubt, throw it in the brass bag and let the yard grade it.

Getting the best price at the yard

Three things get you a better rate:

1. Turn up with sorted loads. Yards treat sorted scrap as less work, and some will quietly upgrade you a fraction. Unsorted loads get graded to the lowest common denominator.

1. Go midweek, midmorning. Yards are calmer, staff have time to grade properly, and you're more likely to be weighed accurately.

1. Build a relationship with one yard. Tradespeople who use the same yard weekly often get a trade account and slightly preferential grading because the yard knows the quality of their scrap.

Check today's copper prices on our live price page before you go, it lets you spot if a yard is trying to quote you below market.

For the bigger picture: read our Tradesperson's Guide to Scrap Income, everything you need to turn job scrap into a reliable second income stream.