Cable that comes out with the switchgear.

A switchgear replacement is usually driven by age, a fault, a capacity increase or a change in topology. In every case the incoming and outgoing cables are disconnected, and the practical choice on site is to cut behind the termination rather than try to reuse an elbow that has sat on a stud for the life of the gear.

Padmount work is similar but more compressed. A transformer swap leaves the loop cable in the ground with the elbows removed and the ends taped, and a ring main unit change can leave two or three short tails per way. Those tails are where most of the copper in this category sits.

A separable elbow, a loadbreak connector and a stress cone all do the same job: control the field at the point where the shield ends. That is why cut-back length matters. A cable cut close behind a stress cone has lost the section the next termination needs, while a cable cut a foot back can be terminated again.

Cut-back is easy to record and easy to forget. Measure from the jacket end to the copper, write it on the tape, and photograph the end beside the tape. That one measurement tells a buyer whether the cable has a future as cable or a future as copper.

• Elbows and inserts that come off cleanly are kept and described separately.
• Cut-back is measured from the end of the jacket to the conductor.
• A cable cut behind the shield has no shield left to bond.
• Short tails are still copper; they are simply not reusable cable.

Reuse depends on three things: enough length beyond the cut-back, an intact shield and jacket, and a class that still suits the new gear. A 15 kV feeder pulled from a padmount may be perfectly sound and still have no home if the replacement is 25 kV or the new route is shorter.

Spare cable stored in the substation is the other half of this category. Plants and campuses often keep a coil of matched cable against a future failure, tagged with the circuit it belongs to. That coil is usually the best material in the lot because it was never cut.

Gear lots from a plant changeover carry documentation by default: the switching schedule, the isolation permit, the event that prompted the change. Ask for the isolation record and the date the circuit was proved dead. A buyer will also want to know whether the cable was tested before disconnection or abandoned.

One more question decides who can release the material. Gear and cable are frequently owned by a landlord while the tenant ran the process, and the release has to come from the party that owns the installation, not the contractor pulling it. Settle that before the crew starts cutting.

Write the bay number or circuit name on the tape at each cut end. A short tail traceable to a drawing is reviewed differently from an unlabelled one.