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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries
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To: energyplay who wrote (65818)7/2/2005 5:24:33 PM
From: Slagle  Read Replies (1) of 74559
 
energyplay, Re: "copper" You are right and some of those items I didn't think of at all. What Coxe says will be the scarce commodities are the base metals: copper, nickel, lead and zinc. He lays special emphasis on copper and I bet he is right. Lots of our copper here is recycled copper and I would guess that in China and India there is not lots of that.

I don't think I have ever seen copper tubing used in construction in Asia. They use lots of plastic. I'm not so sure what they use in Japan because I have never done any plumbing there. Come to think of it I don't even remember seeing any copper sweat fitting in hardware stores over there. Bunches of cast and malleable iron and plastic though.
Standard PVC pipe will handle considerable pressure. The problem is blow outs in improperly prepared joints and fatigue fractures in fittings due to stresses caused by water hammer. If you use schedule 80 fittings and prepare the joints properly it is as good as anything else. Buried plastic pipe almost never causes a problem as the surrounding soil supports the pipe and prevents flexure. PVC ruptures easily from freezing though so its not too good in cold climates.

Lots of refrigeration heat exchangers are made of aluminum now, even some automotive radiators. I have a freezer with steel flat plate heat exchangers in which the sides of the freezer are the heat exchanger, all made from steel.

There is a really big difference in the amount of copper used in a house wired for 220 volt branch circuits. I have wired two houses in Asia with my own hands and it is so much easier and better with 220 volts. On the system they use there is no useless(and dangerous) bond or earth ground third wire like we use here.

Imagine the difference: For a branch circuit from the distribution panel to a room with several receptacles in the US we would use 12/2 Romex with a ground or three #12 copper wires. For the same load and number of outlets in Asia you would use only two #14 or #16 copper wires, very much less copper, less than half as much as we would use here for the same purpose. The only time you pull an earth ground over there is where you actually need it, like for a ground path for current being dumped to ground through a zener diode or MOV for voltage spike suppression as in a computer power supply, ect.

This may not sound like much but in a billion houses it is a heck of a lot of copper.

I definitely remember the copper shortages back in the 1970's. My electrical crew would save every last scrap of copper for beer money.

Is there any good way to make money with copper? <g>
Slagle
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