What is the scrap metal from an old washing machine worth?

Answer 1

It depends where you live and what the market for scrap metal is like there.

If you ask a scrap metal merchant to come and fetch it you may get nothing in cash but you would save yourself the time and the cost of taking it to a scrap yard, or paying someone else to take it for you.

Don't forget the scrapped washing machine won't just be tossed straight into a big white-hot cauldron to be melted! That could be done, but it isn't sensible to that, any more than it is sensible to bury it in the ground. Doing either of those things would just be a waste of some valuable scrap materials.

The valuable parts are mainly metals like the copper in the motor windings and the electric wiring, the stainless steel wash drum and any aluminum that is sometimes used in motors, pulley wheels, internal frames/support brackets, etc . Those metals are much more valuable than the painted steel used for the casing.

The scrap merchant has to pay someone to strip out the valuable stuff before the rest is sent away to be crushed and melted down - just like like the body of a scrapped car - which is why you would be lucky to get any money for your old washing machine.

However, as said at the beginning here, the answer to your question really depends on where you live and what the market for scrap metal is like there - so you would be wise to call a local scrap metal merchant to ask this question!

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As noted it depends on where you live, most salvage yards will probably want to charge you a fee for taking it off your hands. Most appliance dealers will cart your old machine away if you purchase a new one from them, they in turn will stockpile a few of them and take them to a scrap metal yard where they will just drop them off. If you want to go through the process of striping all the useful parts off a washing machine you might do well to know what was wrong with the old one and salvage the good parts. A person such as myself who repaired appliances for many years would just strip the wire off a machine to replace burnt wires on a customer's machine any other parts I would not be interested in because I would have to guarantee it for one year. What you could do is have a trade school use it for educating the repairmen and women of the future.