An increasing number of people choose to sell scrap metal as a way to earn some extra money. If you’re one of them, you probably already know that different scrap yards can have different prices. And when you look at their offers, you usually focus mostly on how much you can earn. But the amount of money you can get depends on the weight of your scrap and the type of metals you’ve collected. That’s why the first thing you need to do when you try to determine the price is getting the exact weight. And remember that being accurate is really important if you want to avoid disappointments later on.
Of course, when you decide to sell your scrap metal, you don’t really need to know its weight beforehand. Whether you take it to your local scrap yard or arrange a pick up from your address with a company like transmetal.co.uk, everything you want to sell will be weighed again before the sale. But being able to estimate the amount of money you can get is helpful when it comes to planning your monthly budget, so it’s an especially good option for those who hope to make a regular income out of selling scrap.
How to weigh scrap metal?
So when you decide you want to find out how much scrap metal you have, you need to know how to do it. Of course, weighing and transporting large items may be more complicated because it’s difficult to move them around on your own. And you should be very careful when attempting it because it can result in injuries. However, with smaller ones, the situation is different, and even a regular bathroom scale should be enough to give you the information you need.
That’s why finding out the weight of your scrap will not be difficult if you have a suitable scale. Simply place the item on the scale and read the number on the screen. And if you have more than one item, you can weigh them individually and add the weights at the end. You can also stand on the scale while holding various metal elements and then subtract your own weight to get the result you’re after.
Can you weigh scrap metal without a scale?
But is it possible to weigh without a scale? Of course, there’s no denying that using a scale is the easiest and the most reliable way, but there are situations when you simply have no way of weighing your scrap. So is there anything else you can do to at least estimate its weight? In reality, the solution is very simple. You just have to find such items, or similar ones, online and check their specifications to learn how heavy they are.
Yet, at the same time, it’s important to remember that even after accurately estimating the weight of your scrap metal, the amount of money you can get by selling it depends on other factors as well. For example, when scrapping an appliance like a fridge as one item, you’ll get a different price than you’d get by selling the metals it contains separately. And then there’s a chance that the scales used at your chosen scrap yard will be more accurate and will show a slightly different result.
Knowing how much scrap metal you have can help you choose the right moment to sell it in order to get the amount of money you need. But you have to be prepared that the final price may be different from the one you hope for depending on the time of sale and the scrap yard you go to. Scrap metal prices tend to change regularly, so you should always make sure that the information you have is up to date.
