#1 vs #2 Copper: How Yards Grade It (and How Not to Get Downgraded)

You’ve stripped your wire and separated your copper. Now the yard sorts it into grades, and those grades are worth meaningfully different amounts per pound. Understanding the grading system — and doing a little prep — is often the difference between a #2 payout and a #1 one on the exact same copper.

The three grades you’ll actually deal with

Scrap copper is graded by purity and cleanliness. From highest to lowest value:

Bare bright — the top grade. Clean, uncoated, unalloyed copper wire, thicker than a certain gauge, shiny and bright. This is stripped building wire at its best: no insulation, no corrosion, no solder, no attachments. It commands the highest price because a refiner can use it almost as-is.

#1 copper — clean copper that isn’t quite bare-bright: unalloyed and uncoated, but may be slightly oxidized (dull brown rather than shiny), or thinner gauge. Clean copper pipe with the fittings removed, heavy clean wire that’s darkened with age. Still a strong price, just under bare bright.

#2 copper — copper that’s dirty, coated, or attached to something. Tinned or soldered wire, painted copper, thin wire, copper with brass fittings still on, or pieces with a bit of oxidation and residue. It’s still copper and still pays well relative to other metals — just a step down from #1.

Below these sit insulated copper wire (priced by recovery rate, covered in the Master Recovery Table) and low-grade coppery items. But bare bright, #1, and #2 are the tiers you’ll be sorting into most.

What pushes copper from #1 down to #2

Yards downgrade for anything that makes the copper harder to refine. The usual culprits:

• Solder on the ends of wire or pipe joints.
• Tinning — that silvery coating on some older wire is a tin plate; it grades the copper down.
• Paint or lacquer on copper pipe or bus bar.
• Attached fittings — brass valves on copper pipe, steel clamps, plastic connectors.
• Heavy oxidation or corrosion — green crust, not just a brown patina.

The cleanup that pays

Here’s the practical part: much of the gap between #1 and #2 is recoverable with a few minutes of work. Cut the soldered ends off your pipe. Remove the brass fittings (and sell them separately as brass — they’re worth good money on their own). Pull the steel clamps. Separate tinned wire from bright wire into different piles. None of this is glamorous, but on a decent quantity of copper it’s some of the best-paid time in scrapping.

The judgment call is quantity. On five pounds of copper, the grade bump may not be worth an hour of cleanup. On fifty, it clearly is. The Strip or Sell calculator applies exactly this kind of time-versus-payout logic to wire, and the same instinct applies to copper cleanup: know your effective hourly rate before you commit the afternoon.

Don’t let the whole load get downgraded

The most expensive beginner mistake is letting one dirty piece drag down a clean batch. If you hand the yard a bucket of bright #1 copper with a few tinned, soldered, or fitting-laden pieces mixed in, they may grade the whole bucket as #2 rather than pick through it. Sort your grades into separate containers before you go, and present them separately. You control which grade your copper is sold as far more than most beginners realize.

Keep learning

• Start with the magnet test to confirm you’ve actually got copper and not plated steel.
• Identify your wire first with the Copper Wire Identification Guide.
• Price a stripped batch with the Copper Wire Yield Calculator.
• Bring it in confidently: Your First Trip to the Scrap Yard.
• More on identifying and sorting in the Metal ID & Sorting guides.