Fifteen vendors bid on the same 2,500 kVA pad-mount transformer for Fayetteville’s public utility in September 2025 and the unit prices ran from $41,200 to $101,253, a 2.5x spread on one spec sheet, with quoted lead times from 10 to 35 weeks. The dealer that will ship a 2,500 kVA pad-mount from stock this week lists it at $104,000, which is 1.77x the median of those fifteen bids. That is the used and refurbished market in one sentence: the premium is for weeks, not for iron, and nobody publishes the curve. We built the Public Bid-Tab Price Book to carry the bids, and this piece adds the other side: 105 dated public listings, lots and bid lines for used and remanufactured transformers, diesel gensets and 15 kV breakers, the test numbers that decide whether a unit is worth the money, what Siemens Energy is doing in Charlotte, and the arithmetic for when paying 1.8x is the cheap option.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from Fayetteville PWC bid tabulation PWC2526016, Sep 2025; n=15)
KLLEN Group America bid $41,200 at 16 to 18 weeks, ABB-Hitachi through Wesco bid $58,871 at 17 to 26 weeks, ERMCO through Tarheel EMC bid $69,950 at 14 to 16 weeks, and Meta Power Solutions bid $101,253 at 18 to 22 weeks; the median is $58,871 and the mean $60,429.
Fifteen Bids, One Transformer, a 2.5x Spread
The Fayetteville PWC tabulation is the single most useful public document we have found on what a new pad-mount costs in America, because it holds fifteen manufacturers pricing nine identical line items on the same day. The 2,500 kVA unit is 12,470GrdY/7,200 x 24,940GrdY/14,400 primary to 480Y/277 secondary, quantity three. The 1,500 kVA line drew bids from $29,880 (Action FMR through PulseMac, 120 to 180 days) to $77,012, median $37,979. The 500 kVA line ran $15,728 to $52,209, median $22,157. The 150 kVA line ran $10,808 to $34,885, median $14,199. Every one of those medians is a row in the Bid-Tab Price Book and the full 100-cell transcription is in this article’s data folder.
The spread inside one bid tab is wider than the spread between new and stock. The high bid at 2,500 kVA is 2.46x the low bid; the in-stock dealer price is 1.77x the median. A buyer who only ever sees one quote cannot know which end of that range they are standing at, which is the whole reason the Quote Check tool exists: it returns the band and the n for a spec, not a single number. The tab also carries the lead times the bidders wrote down, and they do not correlate with price. Calvary Energy quoted 10 weeks at $66,750; Hyundai’s D2 Engineering quoted 31 to 35 weeks at $54,310; KLLEN quoted 16 to 18 weeks at the lowest price on the sheet. Speed was not what the expensive bidders were selling.
Greenville Utilities Commission’s tabs tell the same story two sizes down. In August 2025 eleven vendors bid on ten 150 kVA pad-mounts, from Kllen at $10,101 and 14 weeks to Uttam at $24,845; Border States quoted 63 weeks. In December 2025 the 300 kVA award went to Kllen at $11,763 and 18 weeks over AR Transformers at $12,200 and 14 weeks, and GUC’s sheet awards on “lowest total ownership cost,” which adds the utility’s own loss evaluation to the unit price. One more line on that December sheet matters for this article: Maddox Transformers is listed as a bidder with the note “did not submit a complete bid.” The largest public reseller of remanufactured transformers showed up at a utility bid and did not compete on the factory-order price. It competes on a different axis.
What Stock Costs Against a Factory Order
Maddox Industrial Transformer is the one dealer in this market that publishes a price list. Its web store carries a single price for every voltage variant of each kVA size, in stock, 2,500 kVA at $104,000, 1,500 kVA at $74,100, 1,000 kVA at $63,700, 500 kVA at $39,761, 150 kVA at $31,841, with the caveat “Price and availability may change. Submit RFQ for current details.” The pages do not say whether a given unit is new or remanufactured; Maddox stocks both and sells “same-day deliveries” from stock, remanufactures in 4 to 6 weeks, and builds new to order in under 20 weeks. So the web price is the price of a transformer that ships now, whatever its history.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Per kVA, the fifteen-bidder medians fall from $94.7 at 150 kVA to $44.3 at 500 kVA and $23.5 at 2,500 kVA, while Maddox’s stock prices fall from $212 to $79.5 to $41.6; the stock-to-median ratio is 2.24x at 150 kVA, 1.79x at 500 kVA, 1.69x at 750 kVA and 1.77x at 2,500 kVA.
The stock premium is the price of a queue position, and it holds at 1.7x to 2.2x across every size we can match. That is a stronger claim than Maddox makes about itself. Its own 2023 article says remanufactured units offer “a cost reduction between 10% and 40% for the same transformer” against new, and that while “lead times on new, factory-built transformers are stretching out to more than 80 weeks, in-stock, remanufactured transformers can be made available as quickly as 1 to 4 weeks” (Maddox, May 2023). Both statements can be true at once if the “new” Maddox compares against is its own built-to-order price, not a fifteen-bidder utility tab. A utility buying 39 units of one size at a time with a loss-evaluated award gets a factory-order price nobody buying one unit will ever see; the Transformer Sizing and Cost tool prices both ends so a buyer knows which one they are being quoted.
The only place Maddox publishes a clean used-versus-new pair is dry-type. On its 600 D to 208Y/120 page a 150 kVA unit is $10,215 new and $6,640 used, 65% of new, and the ratio holds at 65% down to 15 kVA ($2,588 new, $1,682 used); on its 480 D pages used sits at 80% of new. Those are the only public used-to-new ratios for transformers we have found anywhere, and they are for indoor dry-type units that carry a five-year warranty and ship in “3-5 business days” (Maddox). For liquid-filled pad-mounts, the market publishes one number per unit and lets the buyer guess what condition it is in.
Used Gensets Are Priced by Model Year, Not Hours
Generator dealers publish more prices than transformer dealers do, and the prices sort by model year with almost no regard for hours. We captured 27 dealer listings for 500 to 2,000 kW diesel gensets between June and September 2026 and 18 of them are priced, used, standby-rated, diesel and not rebuilt. A 2011 Cummins QSK60 2,000 kW with 667 hours asks $669,900 at Depco, $335 per kW. A 2000 Cummins DQKC 2,000 kW with 393 hours, fewer hours on the same engine family, asks $349,900, $175 per kW. A 1998 Generac 2,000 kW with 58 hours asks $120,000 at Generator Source, $60 per kW. Fifty-eight hours in twenty-eight years is not a selling point to a buyer who knows what sitting does to seals, hoses and injectors; the market prices it as such.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
The four 2018 to 2019 units ask $216 to $307 per kW with a median of $237, the four 2011 to 2017 units $180 to $335 with a median of $239, and the eight units built 1996 to 2003 ask $47 to $175 with a median of $106, against $780 per kW for a new 2,500 kW CAT 3516C Tier 2 sitting in the same dealer’s yard.
A dealer claim that low-hour used gensets “now command 60 to 75%” of new does not survive the listings; the newest used iron we can find asks 30 to 43% of new Tier 2 stock. The 60 to 75% figure comes from Central States Diesel Generators, which also states that a tested used unit ships in 1 to 4 weeks against 52 weeks or more for a new 1,250 to 3,250 kW set. The ratio depends on what “new” means. Against Depco’s new 3516C at $1.95 million, the 2011 QSK60 is 43% and the 2015 QSK60 with 100 hours at $595,000 is 38%. Against a new Tier 4 Final unit, which our genset piece from September 2025 priced at more than $1.4 million for 2,000 kW, the same units are 34% and 30%. There is no public $/kW series for new gensets, so every used ratio is a ratio to a quote, and the Genset TCO tool asks for the quote rather than assuming one.
The tier question is what makes old iron legal. Most of these units are Tier 2 or carry no tier at all, which limits them to emergency service. Under 40 CFR 60.4211(f) an emergency stationary engine may run “for a maximum of 100 hours per calendar year” for maintenance and readiness testing, of which “up to 50 hours per calendar year” may be non-emergency, and none of those 50 for peak shaving or paid demand response. A used Tier 2 set is a backup generator, full stop, and the Genset TCO model treats its run hours accordingly. Our September piece walked through the emergency-engine route by state; this one only adds that the listings confirm the price penalty for the constraint: the one new emergency-only Tier 2 unit we found, a Cummins DQFAD 1,000 kW at $269,900, is $270 per kW, inside the used 2011 to 2019 band.
The Surplus Auction Floor
Below the dealers sits the auction floor, and it is where the “cents on the dollar” stories come from. On the morning of September 10, 2026 GovDeals had 19 lots in its transformers category and 77 in generators. The one that matters is a Cooper 5,000 kVA OA/FFA substation transformer, 13,800 V to 4,160Y/2,400, consigned by an industrial seller in Norco, Louisiana, closing September 17. At 07:30 UTC it had seven bids and stood at $100; an hour later it stood at $2,100. Maddox lists a 5,000 kVA pad-mount from stock at $174,200. A 75 kVA pad-mount in Questa, New Mexico sat at $100 against a $3,193 new-unit award at GUC three months earlier.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Six open GovDeals lots on September 10, 2026 carried current bids of $100 to $10,500; the 5,000 kVA Cooper at $2,100 was bid at 1.2% of the nearest in-stock dealer price for the size, with seven days left.
Realized auction prices for electrical gear are not public, and that is the gap this market needs filled most. GovDeals shows closed prices only to logged-in accounts and its main site returned “Access Denied” to every route we tried; Purple Wave, HiBid and PublicSurplus render results in scripts a reader cannot paginate; Ritchie Bros wants an account. What is public is the terms, and the terms are the discount. The Cooper lot carries a 15% buyer’s premium, removal “within ten (10) business days from the time and date of the close of the auction,” a refinery gate that requires “a valid driver’s license, copy of registration, proof of insurance and name of your company on both sides the truck,” and no test report of any kind. A 5 MVA tank is a permitted oversize haul with oil on board, and the ten days start the moment the hammer falls. That is why a $2,100 bid is not a $2,100 transformer. We covered the same asymmetry for used CNC machines, where the auction houses also publish lots and never publish hammer prices as a series, and for the EV plants’ machinery that hit those auctions in 2025. Electrical gear has the extra problem that a buyer cannot see the oil.
Refurbishment Is a Ladder, Not a Line Item
No dealer publishes a price list for refurbishment. What they publish is a price for each rung of condition, and the gap between rungs is what refurbishment costs the buyer. Bullock Breakers lists a used GE VB1-13.8-1000-3 15 kV, 2,000 A vacuum breaker at $11,500 and a reconditioned VB1-13.8-1000-2 at $19,500, an $8,000 or 70% premium for the teardown, and on the same page 1,200 A units at $10,500 and a 3,000 A unit at $23,500. EMSCO lists Cutler-Hammer 150 DHP-VR-1000 breakers at $12,500 for 1,200 A and $15,500 for 2,000 A as “used electrically OK,” and a Westinghouse 150DHP500 retrofit conversion at $6,500, with a one-year warranty on refurbished units. Complete lineups, an ABB ADVAC main-tie-main with 17 breakers or a GE PowerVac seven-section main-lug, are quote only. Our switchgear price piece put the new-price context around those numbers; the used market for MV gear is priced by the breaker because the breaker is what gets reconditioned.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
At 2,500 kVA the rungs read $41,200 low bid, $58,871 median bid, $69,950 ERMCO, $101,253 high bid and $104,000 dealer stock; for diesel gensets per kW they read $67 for a 2001 unit, $180 for a 2014 unit, $335 for a 2011 QSK60, $530 for a rebuilt rental-grade 2007 C15 and $780 for new Tier 2 stock; for the breaker, $11,500 used and $19,500 reconditioned.
What a buyer is paying for at each rung is disclosed by exactly one seller. Maddox publishes its remanufacturing test list: “Insulation Resistance / Megger, Transformer Turns Ratio, Winding Resistance, Load and No Load Losses, Excitation Current, Impedance, DGA (for oil filled), PCB (for oil filled), Power Factor (Available on Request), HIPOT (Available on Request),” a “rigorous 45-point quality control inspection,” and a unit “left overnight for a leak and pressure test,” under a PEARL accreditation and a 3-year warranty. Depco publishes its genset test standard: two load banks at 750 kW and 2 MW, and “All of our tests are performed at full capacity for a minimum of one hour” (Depco). Generator Source publishes a stepped procedure, “Apply 25% -> 50% -> 75% -> 80% load; hold each stage to stabilize and log readings” (Generator Source), and posts a load bank video per unit. North American Switchgear describes Class A reconditioning as “teardown to the smallest component” with a one-year warranty (NASWGR). The rebuilt rental-grade rung on the genset ladder, Depco’s 2007 CAT C15 at $265,000 or $530 per kW, sits three times above a used 2014 unit of the same rating and two-thirds of the way to new; that gap is the market’s price for a rebuilt engine and a rebuilt SR4 generator end, and no dealer itemizes it.
Charlotte: Refurbishment at Utility Scale
The same ladder exists at 100 MVA, and one manufacturer built a factory for it. Siemens Energy announced in February 2024 that it would spend $150 million to expand its Charlotte, North Carolina plant into the first Siemens Energy transformer production site in the United States, with output of 24 new large power transformers a year rising to 57 and, in the same building, 12 refurbished units a year rising to 24 (APPA, Feb 16 2024; Siemens Energy release, Feb 14 2024). The release put the problem plainly: “only 20% of U.S. large power transformer demand is met by domestic supply with lead times of up to five years.” By June 2025 the start date had moved. Board member Tim Holt told Reuters the first Charlotte units would “run off the factory lines in early 2027,” a year later than the release, and that “more than 80% of large power transformers (LPT) are currently imported” (Transformer Magazine, Jun 30 2025). On February 3, 2026 the company added a further $421 million across North Carolina, most of it generators and gas turbines in Charlotte plus a grid parts and service center near Winston-Salem (WFAE, Feb 3 2026).
A refurbished LPT is a new core-and-coil decision deferred, and Siemens Energy has priced a slot for it at one refurb for every two new units. The refurb line is the manufacturer’s answer to the same arithmetic the pad-mount buyer faces: when a factory order is 143 weeks out for a GSU, as Wood Mackenzie’s Q2 2025 survey put it, a unit that can be rewound, re-gasketed, re-bushed and re-oiled in a domestic shop is a queue position the utility already owns. The fleet supports the business. NREL estimates the country runs 60 to 80 million distribution transformers, “about half are more than 33 years old,” and replaces 2.5% to 3% of them a year (pv magazine, Jan 7 2025). Half a fleet past its design life is a used market whether or not anyone indexes it, and the Lead-Time Monitor carries the factory-order lead times that set the price of the alternative.
The Numbers on the Oil Report
The reason used electrical gear trades without an index is that its condition lives in a lab report the buyer has to ask for. The good news is that the acceptance numbers are public, and federal. The Bureau of Reclamation’s transformer manual reprints the Doble in-service oil limits by voltage class: dielectric breakdown by ASTM D1816 of at least 20 kV up to 288 kV and 25 kV above; oil power factor at 25 C no more than 0.5%; water no more than 35 ppm up to 69 kV, 25 ppm to 288 kV and 20 ppm above; interfacial tension at least 25 dynes/cm; neutralization number no more than 0.2 mg KOH/g up to 69 kV and 0.15 above (USBR, Transformers: Basics, Maintenance, and Diagnostics, Apr 2005, Table 19). The manual also says what a failure means in dollars: filtration and drying “may be required if the dielectric breakdown voltage or water content do not meet these limits,” while “reclamation (clay filtration) or replacement of the oil may be required” when power factor, IFT, acidity or sludge fail.
Source: Bureau of Reclamation, Transformers: Basics, Maintenance, and Diagnostics, April 2005, and FIST 3-31 Transformer Diagnostics, June 2003
Eight limits sort a used transformer into three bins: pass, process the oil, or walk, with oil power factor at 0.5% and 1.0%, TDCG at 720 ppm and 4,630 ppm and overall insulation power factor at 0.5% as the thresholds.
Oil power factor above 1.0% is the one number that ends the negotiation. FIST 3-31 puts the bands in order: below 0.5% at 25 C is the in-service limit; between 0.5% and 1.0% “further investigation is required; the oil may require replacement or Fuller’s earth filtering”; above 1.0% “the oil may cause failure of the transformer; replacement or reclaiming of the oil is required immediately”; above 2% “oil should be removed from service and replaced because equipment failure is imminent. The oil cannot be reclaimed” (FIST 3-31, Jun 2003). The same manual carries the IEEE C57.104 dissolved-gas conditions, with Condition 1 at total dissolved combustible gas below 720 ppm and Condition 4 above 4,630 ppm where the guidance is “consider removal from service,” and the Doble field-test grades of G, I, D and B, with the rule that overall insulation power factor “should not exceed 0.5% at 20 EC.” On moisture it is blunt: “Each time the moisture is doubled in a transformer, the life of the insulation is cut by one-half.” Maddox’s own 2020 buyer checklist asked sellers to “Provide ANSI C.57 test reports” and “Provide Dissolved Gas Analysis (DGA) of the transformer oil results prior to rebuilding,” and that is the right order: the DGA before the rebuild tells you what the rebuild had to fix.
For gensets the equivalent document is the load bank log, and the standard the dealers set for themselves is a floor: Depco’s one hour at full capacity, Generator Source’s four steps to 80%. A unit with 58 hours in 28 years has never been through either, and the buyer should budget the test as part of the price rather than take a “low hours” label as a condition report.
Weeks, Not Cents, Is the Product
Everything above collapses to one chart. The used and refurbished market does not sell a discount; it sells the weeks between a factory order and an energized bus, and the discount or premium follows from how many weeks a buyer is short.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from Fayetteville PWC and Greenville Utilities bid tabs, 2025; Maddox, Depco and Central States Diesel pages, 2023 to 2026)
Fifteen PWC bidders quoted 10 to 35 weeks with a median of 18; GUC’s vendors quoted 10 to 63; Maddox’s own comparison point for factory-built units is 80 weeks; remanufactured pad-mounts ship in 1 to 6 weeks, used dry-type in a week, and used gensets in one to four.
The median gap is 17 weeks, and 17 weeks has a price a buyer can compute before asking for a quote. The Lead-Time Monitor’s published figures for the new units are the long side of that gap: 50 to 66 weeks for a 1,500 to 2,000 kW diesel and, for the transformer classes above pad-mount, the Wood Mackenzie survey figures we walked through in October. The Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule tool takes the PO date and the class and returns the energization month, which is the number the stock premium has to beat. The dealers know this. Depco names an inventory bucket “ready in seven.” Bullock’s pitch is “a fraction of the lead time.” EMSCO’s is “when lead times won’t work.” Woodstock Power promises “zero lead time.” None of them leads with price, and the price list, where one exists, confirms they should not.
Where It Trades
The market has perhaps a dozen public venues that a buyer can read without a login, and what they disclose varies more than what they charge.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
Of the ten venues, six print prices on at least some units, three state a warranty (Maddox 3 years with a 5-year option, EMSCO and North American Switchgear 1 year), two publish a load-bank procedure, one publishes a transformer test list, and the two auction houses sell “as is, where is” with a 10% to 15% buyer’s premium and no test of any kind.
The OEM Disclosure Scorecard grades the manufacturers on whether they publish lead times, list prices and backlog; the used market deserves the same treatment and this table is the v0 of it. The scoring is simple. A seller that prints a price, a warranty and a test procedure has told the buyer everything the buyer needs to price the risk. A seller that prints a price and nothing else has told the buyer where the negotiation starts. An auction has told the buyer where the truck goes. The Equipment Price Benchmark, once it has contributions, will be the first place the closing prices from that third category appear as a distribution, because the auction houses will not publish them and the buyers who paid them are the only other people who know.
What to Do Monday
Pull the bid tabs before the quotes. Fayetteville PWC and Greenville Utilities publish theirs as PDFs and so do dozens of other municipal utilities, and the Public Bid-Tab Price Book carries the ones we have transcribed with n and date; a buyer who knows the fifteen-bidder median for a 2,500 kVA pad-mount is $58,871 walks into a dealer conversation knowing that $104,000 is a 1.77x premium for delivery this month and not a market price. Ask every used or remanufactured seller for the eight numbers on the oil report, the Doble letter grades and the factory test sheet, in that order, before discussing price; the ones that publish a test list will hand them over and the ones that do not will tell you what the discount is for. For gensets, ask for the load-bank log at 100% for at least an hour and treat model year, not hours, as the price variable, because that is how the dealers price it. And run the delay arithmetic first: the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule gives the weeks, the section below gives the formula, and together they say whether the stock premium is a cost or a saving.
Behind the paywall: the five checks we would run before wiring money for a used transformer, genset or breaker, each tied to a published limit, and three worked examples that show why the $104,000 in-stock 2,500 kVA pad-mount beats the $58,871 median bid for any project that gates more than $2.2 million of idle capital, built on the Public Bid-Tab Price Book bands.