Surplus wire buying in Garden City, Idaho

Garden City is a narrow band of industrial ground along the Boise River, surrounded by the city it is not part of, with Chinden Boulevard running its length. The building stock is old: shallow warehouses, quonset-style shops, additions built onto additions. Tenants turn over, each one rewires to suit a new use, and the discards pile up in mezzanines and back rooms.

Old industrial buildings rewired once per tenant

Almost every project here is a retrofit. A shop takes over a building that was built for something else, and the electrical work becomes a new service, a transformer, and feeders run overhead in tray or pipe to equipment that did not exist when the place was wired. What comes out is a mix of copper THHN, XHHW and older rubber-covered conductor that is worth sorting but not worth reusing.

There is also a steady trade in small-shop material: SOOW cord for welders and compressors, 6 and 4 welding cable with cracked jackets, and control cable pulled off the small packaging and brewing equipment along the corridor. Because the lots are tight, most of this is stored on racks and mezzanines, so short cut lengths are the norm rather than full reels, and the tags are usually long gone.

Logistics

Chinden Boulevard is US-20 and US-26 and forms the spine of the district; the I-184 connector and I-84 are about two miles south. The side streets are narrow, some are gravel or unpaved at the river end, and a fifty-three foot trailer cannot always turn into a lot laid out for a 1950s warehouse. Expect forklift loading, low doors and no dock at most addresses, so a straight truck is often the practical choice. Photograph the wire where it is stacked, the jacket printing, and the building entrance and turning area, because clearance decides whether a load is worth the trip.