Recover. Repurpose. Redeploy.

Thirty-five years with this equipment

Before any of this was a business it was a career. Thirty-five years installing instrumentation, calibrating it, servicing it and pulling it back out again when a plant changed direction. The analyzers in these photographs are not a category we researched. They are the units we were sent to fix at two in the morning, the boards we kept spares of because the lead time was twelve weeks, and the racks we watched get replaced over a permit rather than a fault.

That is why an offer comes back from a photograph of a data tag. We are reading a model number we have already worked on, not searching one. It is also why a unit that does not power up is still worth sending: we know which board inside it is the expensive one, and we know it usually is not the one that failed.

Most of those years were spent in power generation, oil and gas, manufacturing and mining, on Thermo, Servomex, ECOM, Testo and Teledyne (API) equipment. The instrumentation career started in 1994, building on hands-on training that began in school in 1991.

The business started in 2016 with an eBay store, selling refurbished instruments. What happened next was not planned. The same companies we were installing new equipment for started asking whether we wanted the old units coming out — the obsolete ones, the spares nobody had opened, the racks being replaced because a permit changed. Phoenix Surplus grew out of answering yes.

It is now a full-scale instrumentation and equipment business, run out of a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Broken Arrow. We are small and direct: when you email us, you are talking to the people who will value your equipment and arrange to collect it.

What we do

Industrial instrumentation rarely fails all at once. A CEMS rack is replaced because a permit changed. A lab consolidates and a good bench goes into storage. A technician retires and thirty years of spares sit until somebody needs the room. Then it is either forgotten or scrapped for weight — while somewhere a plant runs the same model, hunting a board the manufacturer discontinued years ago.

Phoenix Surplus buys that equipment, working or not. Q&W Instruments identifies, tests and cleans it, then lists it for the next plant that needs it. What cannot be recovered whole is parted out, so the good components stay in service.

Why sellers work with us

Most people sitting on surplus instrumentation are not in the business of selling it. They have a room to clear and a deadline, and no interest in photographing forty items, researching model numbers and answering questions from strangers for three months.

We do that part. Send a nameplate photo or a spreadsheet, and you get one written offer for the lot. If something has no value we say so, rather than letting you find out after you have packed it.

Why buyers work with us

The instruments we sell are hard to get anywhere else at a sane price: discontinued analyzers, board-level spares, detectors and sample components still in daily use in hundreds of plants, but no longer on any manufacturer's price list. Every listing states plainly what was tested and what was not, and sales run through eBay, so buyer protection and tracked shipping come as standard.