We buy surplus AC and BX cable

BX is the name electricians still use for the old armoured cable, and it is still in the walls of a great many buildings put up between the sixties and the eighties. When one of those buildings is rewired, the cable comes out by the coil, dusty and cut, and it is not the same item as new MC.

The distinction matters because AC and MC look alike and are built differently. AC relies on a bonding strip in contact with the armour for its ground path. MC carries a separate grounding conductor. Getting the two mixed in one pile makes the review harder and usually works against the lot.

What comes out of a sixties or seventies building

Fourteen two, twelve two and ten three in flexible armour, with and without a ground, run through framing and above ceilings. The armour is often galvanised steel that has gone dull, and the paper or cloth wrap inside may be brittle. Removal tends to be rough because nobody is saving it.

Expect kinks, crushed sections and cut ends with the conductors pulled back. That is normal for a rewire and it does not stop the lot being reviewed. It does mean the material is assessed as recovery, since armoured cable that has been pulled through a demolition rarely goes back into a wall.

The bond strip, and telling AC from MC

Look inside the armour at a cut end. AC has a thin aluminum bond strip running in contact with the armour, often visible as a bright flat ribbon between the conductors and the metal. MC has a separate green grounding conductor instead, or an insulated ground in the same bundle.

That one look at a cut end tells you which pile you have. It also tells a buyer whether the material meets a current application or is only useful for recovery. Photograph two or three cut ends rather than describing them, and the sorting question answers itself.

New coils from a cancelled fit-out

Not all AC is old. A cancelled fit-out sometimes leaves factory coils of armoured cable that were delivered and never installed, still banded and still labeled. Those coils review as new surplus and are a completely different item from a rewire pile in the same building.

Keep them out of the demolition container. A single unopened coil sitting in a roll-off of pulled cable will be treated as pulled cable, and the difference is worth more than the minute it takes to set it aside. Label it with the configuration and put it somewhere dry.

The housing stock in Hyde Park, Travis Heights, Clarksville and the streets around the university is full of armoured cable, and every renovation pulls some of it out. Older commercial buildings along the core corridors do the same on a larger scale.

Those jobs are small and frequent rather than large and rare, so the lots arrive a few coils at a time. That is fine. A contractor who keeps the armoured cable separate in the back of a truck for a month will have a worthwhile lot without any extra effort.