E7018 electrode cost breakdown

I had been curious about the cost breakdown of an individual 1/8″ E7018 SMAW electrode, so I tried doing the quick and dirty math down to the inch. When doing the math, I generally rounded to the nearest cent.

I took the price of a 50 lb. can of 1/8″ Lincoln Excalibur 7018 MR from grainger.com, which is about $223 without shipping, and divided it to find the price per pound. This brought me to $4.46 per pound of 7018 electrodes, further broken down to $0.28 per oz. Using a scale in the kitchen typically used for measuring cooking ingredients, I found that a single electrode weighed in at 1.3 oz. making the cost of a single electrode roughly $0.36. The full length of one of the electrodes is 14″, but the portion of electrode typically consumed without burning the identification numbers is about 12″ which works nicely for this particular equation. This would indicate the cost of one inch of 1/8″ Lincoln Excalibur 7018 MR to be somewhere around $0.03 if buying a 50 lb. can. The cost increases one to five cents per inch if purchasing the electrodes at a lesser quantity. The cost of a single electrode is nearly $1 in the 1 lb. pack.

This information is interesting to me because I’ve seen a lot of wasted portions of electrodes on the floors of various shops and jobsites, and I wondered what the actual cost of that waste was. Now I have a rough idea and so do you. Let me know your thoughts or if you think my math ain’t mathin’.