Make $500 a day with HVAC Arbitrage
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes and 13 seconds
There are 145,000 HVAC businesses in the United States, and all those business owners face the same problem. How are we going to recycle old equipment?
Most of these businesses have a pile in their shop or compound that looks something like this.
When an old unit is replaced, the homeowner almost never wants to keep the old furnace and air conditioner, so the contractor hauls it away.
It’s up to the contractor to decide what to do with it. In my personal experience I’ve seen business owners who let their employees take them home, or pay someone to scrap it themselves, or just throw it in the general tin bin.
Here’s a post in a forum of HVAC contractors that asks about recycling practices.
You may ask, why is this important? What does it matter to me?
Well this may be a narrow niche, but there are riches to be made in the niches.
Let’s take an old air conditioner or condenser unit.
This thing is made up of tin, copper, and aluminum, and depending on its size could weigh anywhere from 100 to 300 pounds.
Thrown in the general tin scrap, it might get $.10 per pound.
100 * $.10 = $10 per unit
Not very profitable, but it’s what some business owners do to get them out of the way. They don’t want to handle it, so they just get rid of it.
This is where you come in. You go to each business owner and say “Look, I know you’re doing a few installs a day, and you’ve got lots of old units that you need to get rid of. I’ll come pick them up directly from the job site and I’ll pay you $25 for each air conditioner, and $10 for each furnace.”
Now you may be thinking, “Why would I want a bunch of old air conditioners if I can only recycle them for $10?”
Well my friend, you can actually recycle them for a lot more then that if you know how.
Each unit has 40-50 pounds of copper and aluminum inside. This stuff is worth about $.90 per pound.
50 * $.90 = $45
See, you are already making money! But we aren’t going to stop there.
You’ll still recycle the leftover tin, and if they replace the copper line set you want that as well.
Here is a good video that goes into specific detail of how to make up to $100 per scrap unit.
With a truck and a little bit of cold calling business owners, you could be picking up 10 units a day and making $50 with each one!
10 * 50 = $500
Tomorrow we’ll go deeper into the strategy of cold calling these business owners. How to do it, what to say, and how to close the deal.
** Unless you have an EPA license, you must make sure the contractor removes all refrigerant from the unit to be recycled. This is their responsibility. Do not touch a unit that has not been properly recovered as it can result in environmental and physical damage.
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