My uncle's advice on vertical cable runs finally clicked after a job last Tuesday

He always told me to leave a service loop at the top of every vertical run, but I figured it was just extra work. Then I had to pull a new line through a 3-story office building in Portland and the old runs were so tight I had to cut and splice every single one. Has anyone else found a trick for convincing new guys to follow the standard practices before they learn the hard way?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_robin14d ago

Leave a service loop at the top of every vertical run" - that's one of those bits of advice you don't get why it matters until you're stuck on a ladder with no slack. I've seen it with new guys on my own jobs, they think extra loops are wasteful. But what I do is show them a picture of a pull that went wrong, all twisted and tight, then ask them to guess how much extra time it took to fix. Once they see the cost of skipping it, the lesson sticks. It's like that old saying, "you can pay me now or pay me later" - they always get it after the first splice.

river_thompson14d ago

That part about "after the first splice" is actually where I gotta gently push back a bit. Most of the time if you skip the service loop you won't even make it to the splice because the cable gets all jacked up during the pull itself. I've seen it where the cable gets pinched so bad at the top of the riser that the jacket is torn and the conductors are shorted out before anyone even gets a chance to terminate. So yeah you're totally right about the lesson sticking once they see the cost, I just think the price gets paid way earlier than the splice step a lot of the time.

cora81314d ago

Hell yeah, did you try making them pull a test run first with no loop to see the mess?