Coin Counting Machines

andrew, the counting machines you go to...are they coinstar?

The credit union I use has a coin counting machine but its not a coin star. It looks almost like a washing machine, square, about the same size and you lift a lid on the top to dump the coins. It doesn't charge to use it at my CU but I was told I couldn't purchase the bags that they were sent back to the FED and if I wanted to purchase coins I would have to buy boxes.

One of the banks I used to bank at had big plastic bags. The sorted and counted this put them in these bags and sealed em waiting for pick up.
You could walk in and let them know you wanted a bag of pennies and like a bag of ice they would bring me a $50 bag

It's all kind of variable - some counting machines will reject silver some won't. Some banks will sell you bags, some won't. You'll all have to experiment and observe in order to figure it out for your banks.

I know the TCF's in the Chicago area use counting machines that reject silver (not sure if all of them do, but the little short ones in most of the branches do). They don't separate the coins into bags either, it all gets dumped into a big wheeled box that they probably ship out to be counted and rolled. Those particular machines collect anything magnetic inside and don't usually kick it back out to the reject tray and they can also tell the difference between bronze and zinc pennies. When the tellers go in to service the machines, they'll clean out the internal reject bucket and usually throw out all the coins in there!

Most of the Chase and Harris banks in the area use the commercial counters that dump into bags but I've been unsuccessful so far in purchasing the bags. I assume that these counters (which seem more robust) don't reject silver - if they kicked it out I imagine we wouldn't be finding it in rolls.

I doubt any of the machines will kick out War Nickels though. They have a similar weight and the same electrical conductivity as regular nickels.

I know for a fact that I have received 2 silver dimes from 2 different people using 2 different vending machines that both rejected silver

I saw a documentary on the tele about Coin Star. They showed that all the coins fall into a pair of hoppers that each weigh approximately 800lbs when full. They are picked up by Brinks, taken to one of their facilities then sorted, rolled, and boxed for shipment. Some how, somewhere, Coin Star gets paid.

The banks I go to will sell me bags of coin from the machine. From what I've seen they do a poor job at kicking out canandian coin and they certainly let silver dimes and nickels through. most every bag of pennies I get has at least 1 dime it, but the bag of dimes also ususally have a penny. I don't take the time to count either, I figure that machine is "accurate enough for this country".

The banks ship coin off to brinks or loomis or wherever. The bank pays a fee to have the bag counted and verified. Then coin is rolled and brought back to the bank (also for a fee). What is unclear to me is whether or not the coin is wrapped and brought back to the same bank or mixed in with coin from other banks.

On some site someone said that they went to the loomis depot and saw the operation, but they were told that the coins were segregated between banks and that the banks got back the same coin they sent out. True or not, I have no clue. The service descriptions on the websites of both brinks and loomis list lots of options.

I called loomis and brinks as well to see if they would drop off / pick up bulk coin from my "place of business" but they said that they only work with banks. Figured it was worth a shot, cut out the bank as the middle man.