Other · Tier S

Noble Thermocouple Wire (Type R/S/B)

Torch the bare wire end for five seconds — Pt/Rh stays mirror-white and dead soft; chromel/alumel instantly goes grey-black and stiffens, and alumel sticks to a magnet. Magnet plus flame is the whole test.

Pt ~410 g per lb of bare noble wireBase Rh 6–30% of one legBase Type K/J/T/E/N: zero PGM

eBay typical$18000–31000per lb

Refiner pays$26800per lb

Metal in it$22,633per lb at 4 Aug 2026 spot

Confidencehighof the yield figures

How to spot it

Two silvery-white, very soft, very heavy hair-fine wires 0.25–0.51 mm threaded through a twin-bore high-purity alumina insulator inside a white recrystallised-alumina or SiC sheath, terminating in a cast head. ANSI MC96.1 jackets: R = black, S = green, B = grey (K = yellow, J = black, T = blue). Heads marked TYPE S, TYPE B, Pt/Pt-10%Rh, Omega, Watlow, Thermo Electric or Nanmac. Found in glass furnaces, foundries, cement kilns, crystal pullers, diffusion furnaces and calibration labs.

Metal content

Metal	Quantity	Notes
Platinum	~410 g per lb of bare noble wire	Type S is Pt/Pt-10%Rh; 0.50 mm pair is 8.42 g/m. Blended $65.02/g for S, $67.97 for R, $90.56 for B
Base metal	Rh 6–30% of one leg	Rh is not separately quoted here but materially changes value — B is 39% more per gram than S
Base metal	Type K/J/T/E/N: zero PGM	Ni-alloy or Cu scrap at $0.80–3.50/lb

At 4 Aug 2026 spot prices that works out to $22,633 per pound of contained metal — Platinum 410 g = $22,633. A refiner paying $26800 returns about 118% of that, which is normal: refining costs money and the buyer takes a margin.

Safe removal

Working temperature: Torch test only; no processing heat

Wrap the ceramic sheath in cloth and tap with a hammer — the alumina is brittle and worthless. Slide the twin-bore insulator off and snip the noble wire where it is welded to the copper or compensating extension wire; that weld joint is the boundary of value. Do not melt or home-refine — let a PGM refiner assay the actual Rh ratio, and keep types separated by colour or a mixed lot gets valued to the lowest denominator.

Hazards

🪚 Fibreglass and board dust

NEVER dry-cut boards indoors without extraction.

🌡 Mercury

NEVER vacuum a mercury spill — it aerosolises it. Use a mercury spill kit or sulphur powder, or call your local hazmat line.

☢ Radioactive materials

NEVER grind, sand, saw or incinerate anything that might contain thorium or radium. Sealed sources stay sealed.

⚗ Home acid refining

The practical answer for nearly everyone: sort, concentrate, and sell to a licensed refiner. A good refiner recovers 85–98%, assays rather than guesses, pays on the assay, and takes the waste liability. Your edge as a scrapper is identification and sorting — not chemistry.

Before you scrap it

Modest premium, unusually — an unused R/S/B assembly fetches only 110–140% of metal because industrial buyers also price off spot. Base-metal K/J/T probes are the opposite: $15–60 working versus $0.05 scrap, a 300× ratio, so never scrap an intact base-metal probe.

The common trap

The single most expensive mistake in industrial scrap. R and S extension/compensating wire is copper and copper-nickel, carries the same green or black jacket, the same connector and often the same TYPE S printing, and is worth $2/lb rather than $547/m. Any wire more than 2–3 m from the tip is almost certainly compensating cable. Second: the sheath, head and flange are 98% of assembly mass and worth nothing.

Questions

How much gold is in noble thermocouple wire (type r/s/b)?

Platinum: ~410 g per lb of bare noble wire. At current spot that is about $22,633 of contained metal per pound.

How do you identify noble thermocouple wire (type r/s/b)?

Torch the bare wire end for five seconds — Pt/Rh stays mirror-white and dead soft; chromel/alumel instantly goes grey-black and stiffens, and alumel sticks to a magnet. Magnet plus flame is the whole test.

How do you remove noble thermocouple wire (type r/s/b) safely?

Is noble thermocouple wire (type r/s/b) worth more working than as scrap?

Related in Other

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