Silver Melt Calculator

Using our silver melt calculator, you can put a price on your scrap silver. So if you have decades-old silverware, dusty rings, bracelets, or coins withdrawn from circulation, this calculator will help you to calculate their value. Most people do not realize how much money they have dusting around. All you have to do is weigh your silver item(s) as precisely as possible, input the weight into the calculator together with the purity and how much the silver is per ounce or your desired unit of measurement, and voilà! The tool will tell you how much your scrap silver is worth. It can come in handy!

For the most curious, the Alloy value (silver + another metal) section lets you input the price of a second component of the alloy that your item(s) is made of to determine its overall value. Check the following article to see how much a silver quarter is worth in scrap or what the silver melting point is!

Do you have gold as well? You should check out our scrap gold calculator or this gold melt calculator!

We all know that silver is a metal, a precious metal, to be precise. We learned in school that it is an element of the periodic table and its chemical symbol is Ag. But what more can we say about it?

Silver has been known to humanity since at least 4000 BCE, and its largest producer currently is Mexico, responsible for over 20% of the silver production worldwide. Throughout history, the metal has been used in the production of:

• Ornaments;
• Silverware;
• Coins;
• Jewelry;
• Electronic parts; and
• Photographic equipment.

Silver cannot take full credit for its success. Pure silver is hard to work with due to its fragility. Therefore, most silver items are, in reality, made of alloys, that is, compounds of a metal and another material, which, in the case of silver, is usually copper. Hence, we talk about the purity of silver: the proportion of silver in an alloy, commonly expressed in percentage. Based on this, we can determine a silver item's melt value, that is, the worth of the item's actual pure metal content.

Here are some examples of the most widely used silver alloys and their purity. We've inserted these and many more into the silver melt calculator above to make your life easier!

• Fine silver — Its purity of 99.9% is only due to small traces of impurities. It is the form closest to pure silver; thus, it is too soft for use in production lines. Its current exploitation is based on the investment and trading market.

• Sterling silver — With a purity of 92.5%, it is the most widely recognized alloy of silver. Its specific proportions make it prone to tarnishing, which we all hate it for.

• Coin silver — It owes its name to the coin silver standard in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Silver American coins had a purity of 90% back then. This changed upon the construction of large silver mines in Nevada, following which the USA adopted the sterling silver standard for coinage.

Your job is easy if you are lucky enough to own silver bars. Use the metal weight calculator to find out the weight of the bar. You will need a measuring tape instead of a scale.

This is not due to the metal's properties, though. Silver is a great heat conductor, and it melts ice by concentrating the temperature of its surroundings in one spot. So, your purity test will not work in a freezer!

The coins in circulation nowadays have a monetary value that can be used to acquire assets. But what about old coins? We cannot use them to pay for things anymore, but the material they are made of still has value. The coins can be sold for this material value, that is, the value of the metal if we were to melt it. It is this value that our calculator is designed to help you to determine.

Every material has a melting point: a temperature at which the material will start to become liquid. One of the most common examples is ice, which becomes water at 0 °C. We use this property almost every day.

Now that we know some facts and curiosities about silver scrap prices let us explore the mechanism of the silver melt calculator. How does it determine the value of our scrap silver?

Let's assume we currently own 37 silver quarters from the 1940s that our grandma kept as souvenirs. Between 1873 and 1964, all quarters in the United States weighed 6.25 grams (approximately 0.2 oz t). In addition, we know that they were made of 90% silver and 10% copper.

The total weight of our quarters is, therefore, 231.25 g:

The current price of pure silver is $0.78/g.

If we input these values into the calculator, it will multiply the weight of our coins by their silver purity and price, yielding the value of the pure silver content of the coins ($V$):

But what about the copper?

In the Alloy value (silver + another metal) section, you can input the current price of copper, which is $0.01/g. This might not seem like a lot, but it becomes significant when dealing with larger amounts of coins or other objects.

By inputting this value, we can obtain the worth of the pure copper content ($V_\mathrm{Cu}$) by multiplying the weight of our scrap silver by the price and content of copper (10%).

The sterling silver melt calculator will then sum up the value of the two metals to achieve the overall value of the alloy ($V_\mathrm o$). This is our silver coins' melt value.

And there we have it! We now know the value of our old coins. What are you waiting for? Go! Retrieve all of your dusty silver scraps and get counting!