Monday, March 30, 2009

Pet Peeve of the day


From time to time we run network cable around the building. It's normally Cat5e Plenum rated. This is 8 conductor specially coated cable (for the Plenum-the airspace in a building used for air circulation) This is supposed to give off less toxic gases when burned.

Anyhoo, the last couple of boxes of cable were from our head office and to put ends on a wire or to punch it down, you need to strip off an inch or so of the insulation and untwist the 4 pairs of wires. (green, green stripe, blue, blue stripe, orange, orange stripe, brown, brown stripe) Well these last boxes (AMP brand), you could hardly tell the striped wire from the non striped. It's very easy to lose track of your wires if they colors are very close. More than once, I've had to cut a new end to find the correct pairs.
This picture above is from a good wire brand.
Oh yeah, and another thing since I'm venting is that this wire doesn't have any length marked on it. By this I mean, one end doesn't have 0 feet and the other end 1000 feet. You need to keep track of how much wire you pull off the roll and figure out how much is left for the next job. Come on, how easy would that be to do at the factory? Thanks for listening.

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