What we are building at Strommen Systems
We buy government surplus and corporate liquidation lots, test and repair what is worth saving, and sell it direct. Here is the thesis behind the business.
Strommen Systems is now a Pennsylvania LLC. My wife Aja and I own it fifty-fifty, and we run it out of Philadelphia.
The business is simple to describe and harder to do well. We buy government surplus and corporate liquidation lots, usually sight unseen. We test everything that comes in. We repair what is worth repairing. We sell what passes and part out what does not.
That is the entire model. What makes it work or not work is the judgment applied at each step.
Why surplus
When a university replaces a lab, or a county upgrades its fleet of desktops, or a company folds, the hardware has to go somewhere. It gets sold in bulk, fast, by people whose job is disposal rather than sales. The listing is two lines and one bad photograph. Nobody knows what is in the lot, including the seller.
The result is that price and value come apart. A pallet gets sold for scrap weight because nobody had the time to figure out that a third of it works. Instruments that cost six figures new get listed under “Laboratory Equipment, Miscellaneous” with no model number in the title.
Closing that gap is the business. It is not a trick. It is work: reading listings nobody else reads, knowing what the model numbers mean, and being willing to drive to Baton Rouge if the math holds.
What we actually sell
Three things, and they are related.
Computing and networking. Refurbished business-class PCs and laptops, switches, servers. High volume, predictable, and the category where our standard shows up most plainly: every machine ships with a clean OS, current firmware, Secure Boot enabled, and none of the factory bloatware. It is a low bar and most of the market still limbos under it.
Lab and test equipment. Lower volume, much higher value, far more interesting. Instruments that a university bought for tens of thousands of dollars and disposed of because a grant ended. This is where the price-versus-value gap is widest, because almost nobody bidding on surplus knows what these instruments are.
Repair. Vintage audio, electronics, and increasingly lab gear. A lot of what we buy needs work, and the skills that fix our own stock will fix yours too.
The standard
Everything we sell is powered on, tested under load, and photographed as it ships. If a unit does not pass, it does not get listed with an asterisk. It gets parted out.
That policy costs us money on individual units. It is the only reason anyone should buy from a small operation instead of a big one, so we are not going to compromise on it.
What is next
We are moving into a dedicated space, we are buying bigger and stranger lots, and we are going to write about all of it here. What came in, what it does, what we found when we opened it, and what we learned about the market on the way.
If you are looking for something specific, tell us. We bid every week, and we would rather buy against a known buyer than guess.