lol I hate paying for an education! As mentioned, I installed about 70 lf of dbl runs of cat5 and rg6, as well as cutting all the cat5 to length for all 9 runs, before deciding on the banana peel, so I ripped it out. I also installed a conduit run/box where the builder is adding a window - d'oh!
Well the saga continues. All the wire is run (ran? runned? ranned?
), did it last night (finished at midnight!). As there's only a layer and a half left on the 500 ft spool I'm guessing I used well over 300 lf easy.
I put the coil near the chosen box, unwrapped as much as I guessed I'd need for that run, walked it out attempting to take some of the curl out of it, and ran it over to the distribution area (where I had already drilled three 2-1/2" holes and installed short pieces of 2" pvc conduit), giving an extra 5 ft or so for slop. (my miserly mind - that's $2.80/run in slop - on one end
!)
Then I worked back towards the chosen box, using plastic 3/4" conduit clamps to loosely attach the cables to the trusses as I went. The conduit clamps work GREAT. They have nail holes on both sides, I installed them vertically and nailed just the bottom hole with a roofing nail (tight, so the clamp wouldn't rotate around the nail).
Then you can just bend the top back and stick the wire in there. The 3/4" holds two runs loosely and three snugly, I tried to keep it to two.
Once I got back to the conduit/box, I eyeballed it out about 3 ft past the box and cut it with aviation snips. I grabbed the spool of jute twine I bought for the purpose and taped it to the end of the wire, and fed the wire with the twine attached down the conduit I had run down from the attic into the box, pulling it out about 4" (don't want it in the way of the drywallers).
I cut the twine long at the top and stapled it to a rafter for future pulling.
I now had about 3 ft bunched above the conduit entrance. What I wanted was a way to position it so I could just pull it through from the box (without having to crawl through the insulation in the attic to feed it) if I needed a bit more.
I placed it in the best position I could figure, took a piece of cheap electrical tape and stapled the tape up like a flimsy clamp, just one light staple per side of tape. I figure that will hold it in place, but if I give the wire a stiff pull from the box the tape will tear away from the staples and the wire will slide nicely out.
Yeah, I'm an optimist.
I should mention that the 3/4" conduit wil only hold one run of this wire, and if I need to add say a fiberoptic cable in the future it will be difficult. If I ever do this again I'm using 1-1/2" for the wall runs.
Anyway, I've now got 9 runs installed in the "home run" style, with which I can either distribute a main in to all boxes or choose a box as a main, or a combination.
After I finished, I started considering the termination job. I'll have 5 x 9 terminations at the distribution point, and 5 x 8 at the boxes. 95 terminations. Paul, you may be right!
Pete