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Bargain Hunters Comb Through Treasure Trove Of Used Stanford Gear

Stanford's Surplus Property Sales a Busy Clearinghouse for Old Equipment

Want a defibrillator for cheap? Got a few dozen Petri dishes that need to be cultured? Or merely a home office that needs furnishing? Stanford's Surplus Property Sales aims to cater to these needs and more.

A trip to the warehouse at 340 Bonair Siding, piled high with discarded lab equipment and office castoffs, is more than an exercise in discount shopping. It is the only source authorized to sell excess Stanford property, and its contents – late '90s TVs, weight benches, med-school giveaway pens warning that seconds count after a stroke, hundreds of high-middlebrow Derek Jarman and Merchant-Ivory VHS cassettes – offer a glimpse into Stanford's inner life.

"In the next couple of years, I'll find something I can do with this," says visitor Dan McKinley of the C02 incubator he found on a recent visit for $200, opening its door to reveal more than a hint of corrosion. McKinley's Mountain View firm sells reconditioned lab equipment, and he stops by Surplus Property Sales often to stock his 10,000-square-foot warehouse.

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"We get a lot of small-scale entrepreneurs," says Stan Dunn, assistant director of Stanford's Property Management Office in the Office of Research Administration, which since 2005 has overseen the surplus sales program run by property specialist Alex Perez.

Dunn tracks 88,000 pieces of Stanford stuff monthly – desks, monitors, centrifuges, defibrillators. Each month, 1,800 of those items are sent to Surplus Property Sales. There, they can be acquired in one of two ways: Stanford labs and departments can buy them via iJournal credit to departmental accounts in the university's Reuse Connection program. Individuals like McKinley, whether Stanford-affiliated or not, can buy the same items for cash, cashier's check or money order at the same price, except that on Tuesdays, Stanford affiliates with an ID get 10 percent off.

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Bert Lui, a research assistant in the Stanford Behavioral and Functional Neuroscience Laboratory, picked up a monitor and other gear in this manner on a recent visit. He figures he saved about $20 per item, not heroic, he said, but a welcome stretching of his lab's budget. The warehouse has several power strips in back, so all items can be tested.

"It's an older-generation monitor, and the image quality won't be as great," Lui says. "But I'm OK with it."

That's how McKinley got his incubator. The warehouse is studded with regulars, plopped between sorties in surplus chairs and exhibiting the pigs-in-slop bliss of middle-aged men lost in a gigantic hardware store.

Each item lining the shelves high over their heads has a document trail, initiated as an Excess Request by the disposing department in the university assets-management system called Sunflower. Processing these requests takes time. Hard drives, for example, must almost always be removed. If consumers are OK with that, they can get a laptop for $25 and up. Savvy would-be buyers track a wanted item from its source, peppering Perez for clues to its progress. Perez insists there are no favorites and no shortcuts.

"I was in the Navy," he says. "I understand about security."

Data storage and security, in fact, is the largest current concern among university surplus operations nationwide, says Penn State's Glenn Feagley, vice-president of the University Surplus Property Association and manager of a surplus operation that does $2 million in sales and processes millions of items annually. Copiers, in particular, come under scrutiny. Dunn says Stanford sells them rarely, and then only with hard drives removed.

"If you don't have the right tools, it's almost impossible to get all the data off," Feagley says. "We pride ourselves as an association in erring on the side of caution."

The hard drives themselves are wiped and/or shredded, then taken by Stanford health and safety workers who transfer them to an e-waste vendor for disposal, Perez said.

While revenue is a concern for university surplus departments, particularly as university budgets tighten, Feagley estimates that fewer than half of his group's 37 member departments are self-supporting.

Dunn won't disclose how much the Stanford program takes in, but says it's enough to cover its costs, including Perez's salary and that of an assistant. Originating departments get a cut of sales over $1,000.

Stanford puts many of these big-ticket items, such as vehicles, on Craigslist. But most sales, though theoretically open to the public, are not publicized. That's the case with Dunn's big current job – clearing the 500-room Terman Engineering Center preparatory to its being torn down due to dry rot.

When the school built Terman in the 1970s, Dunn explains, Stanford's square footage per office was greater than what is allowable in university plans today. Terman furniture, accordingly, is larger than will fit comfortably in its replacement, the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center to the northeast. Reuse Connection users tour Terman but largely take a pass.

So two happy customers score a large sofabed formerly allocated to a university official and brought to Terman for the sale, along with a table they swear is cherry or mahogany.

"This isn't usual," Dunn notes as the men hustle their swag into a truck. "Most furniture we get isn't residential. Or if it is, it was from undergraduates, and it's well, well worn."

Terman itself will be disassembled piece by piece and the bulk of its materials recycled. Dunn has already found a buyer for the decorative wood slats in the lobby ceiling.

Factoring in labor and dump fees, Dunn explains, disposing of a single chair would cost the university at least $20. It's much greener to charge someone $20 for that chair, and, in the case of the Reuse Connection, it conserves university assets and stretches units' budgets.

Dunn's office also must recycle or dispose of the volume of discards that Surplus Property Sales can't sell. (On a recent visit, these included a commemorative oak chair, dedicated by a plaque to an economics professor, that someone had set atop a fire, blistering its underside to charcoal.)

But some of the most unlikely items do find homes. Perez says someone bought dozens of the VHS cassettes to donate to a church. The Jarmans, on the other hand, remain orphans.

Surplus Property Sales, 340 Bonair Siding, Stanford, CA 94305 is open Tuesday from noon to 4 p.m., Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Thursday from 8 a.m. to noon. Phone 650-723-3001.

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