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The Problem Of Unused Cabling
Makarand writes "Technological advances constantly render functional cable obsolete by
demanding data transfers at higher rates which older cabling cannot
support. New cables that support higher data rates are laid right over older wires.
The old wires are simply left in place and abandoned. This interesting article talks about the
problems
caused by abandoned cabling. According to an estimate several billion feet of
abandoned cable lies unused in the plenum spaces of buildings that allow air to circulate
creating a fire hazard. Also, very few firms currently worry about removing cabling when they
move out of a building."
Wonder how much it would cost to remove and recover the metals in unused cables, and would it be offset by the sale of the metal?
Several years ago, I took some of that old cabling and stripped out the copper wire. I then used that wire as the loop on fishing sinkers. Saved me a good $0.02 - $0.05 per sinker, and I got to go fishing all summer. Life's pretty good sometimes.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
The article mentions that it is now standard practice for companies leaving a building to cut the network/phone cabling just before they go.
How damn stupid is that?? What else are they going to do, break the bloody windows?!
I've used old cabling to fish through the new cabling. I'm lazy like that.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
i'd think the cables block the airflow, rather than start it??
This is one of those situations where it's just so *easy* to not take responsibility. I think the final solution in the article is best -- require a fairly large deposit when people move in, on top of requiring them to pay to install and remove the cable they use. If they don't remove it for whatever reason, you just take it out of their deposit.
This is the most logical way to handle the problem, but it puts the business using this method at a disadvantage becuase they are possibly requiring higher deposits than competitors.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
I can't RTFM so I will just say that if you look at some of the mess that companies actually leave such as old cat5 cables 1/2 hanging out the walls as well as some of the under floor.
I did work at a DC once where to lay in new cable under the floor you had to physically have someone to push other cables aside so you could get another cable in. There was meant to be 3 ft of room between the tiles and the concrete floor. IT was all full of cables.
They had a lot of downtime as each time your moved one cable it ended becoming disconnected from the switch or the machine. Soon went bust
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
1. Feed loose end of cable out of building, into carpark.
2. Attach cable to axel of bosses car, and forge email from CEO's wife saying she wants him now.
3. Watch boss drive off at great speed.
4. ?????
5. Profit.
Removing cable can be a little tricky (you don't really want to put new strain on the production cables), but it is generally recyclable which can pay for the operation. However, if you start removing things, you had better make sure that the cables are tagged.
See my journal, I write things there
I don't know if I really believe this article all that much. A couple years back, at the place I work (*cough* will be unemployed from after Wednesday), they upgraded the network to CAT-6 and three times the ports. That meant they had to rewire the entire front office cubefarm, which is two stores with a 6" subfloor each, and wiring columns running between stories.
When all those cables converge on a wiring closet, they start to get bundled up pretty high. There's almost no room to run additional cables, plus it would be a huge unsightly mess. We hired an outside contractor to do the job, so they did professional work and disposed of the old wiring. They almost had to...with a 6" subfloor, you either pull cables through with the old wiring, or rip up every single carpet square and floor tile. I can't imagine this situation being much different for other companies.
...
What about the problem of used cabling.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Leaving ethernet points in = $0
Unfortunately, when the tenant moves out they're going to want to take all their switching equipment with them. That leaves a load of loose wires which may or may not be labelled.
Come time to use wiring in an office you have to search through bundles of cables to find the ones you want. If the cable you find doesn't work you're left wondering if it's incorrectly labelled and comes out somewhere else, or is simply broken. If it's broken you've got the expense of laying in replacements, if it's mislabelled you've an expensive analysis job to undertake.
So, no, using someone else's second-hand wiring is not zero cost.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Any place with a decent set of fire codes, and people who are actually following them, shouldn't be worrying. FT-5/Plenum cable is simply not a danger.
Now, if residential "wood burns faster so who cares" FT-1 vinyl cable is used, you get what you pay for. That being said, if the fire inspector ever sees that stuff, you'll probably be looking at a really juicy fine.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Just put a sign out front, Free Cable.
I guarantee you will get some electrician come pull every piece out. And it will not cost you a dime.
He was saying that for the company/person leaving it is zero cost. Businesses do not care about the company moving into the building afterwards and why would they? For you all know a competitor is moving in. If it's mislabelled then you can just rip everything out and start over. Why waste the money analyzing when you can spend less pulling it out and putting new stuff in?
When our office decided to re-cable we were told by the building that we couldn't pull new cable unless we removed all the old cable. It turns out the previous tenants had re-cabled at least three times before. We were initially quoted tens of thousands of dollars to have it removed but finally found a contractor who would remove it all for just a few thousand. As it turns out he had horribly underestimated the job and upon completion, expressed to us how much he had under-quoted us but still held to his quote.
All in all, having pre-existing wiring is a double-edged sword. New tenants might like the idea of saving on cabling and such, but also can come back and bite you when it comes time to upgrade.
It surprises me that landlords over there do not take the same view, though it is possible that there is some liability question under US law of which I am unaware.
We are not without our cabling problems here though, my first job was at a major university, in a 1930s building. The original rubber insulated telephone cables were disused but still in place, and they had coagulated into a malevolent black mass in the risers and cable ducts. I am told they have now been removed, I pity the poor people who had to do it, they must have had to cut them out with an angle grinder.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Several billion feet? That's not long enough to reach Mars even when it came really close recently: it was still over 180 billion feet away.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of cable for making a link to the moon, which is merely about 1.3 billion feet from Earth. Of course, one may need quite a few bridges along the way to keep the signal alive and deal with the variety of recycled cable types :-) Also, the cable may need to be attached to one of the earth's poles to avoid getting wrapped around the earth by the moon's rotation.
Wow, a cable to the moon would be quite an amazing feat of engineering. Do you think it may be remotely possible?
I know that here in Massachusetts the state laws require contractors to remove unused cable from plenums, raised floors, etc. when doing any renovation that involves those spaces. As was explained to me by one contractor the primary reason is the toxic gasses that can be released by PVC & other plastic coatings when they catch fire. Apparently contractors can be fined if they don't remove unused cables. This actually caused a problem at one place where I worked - we had 3/4 of a floor in a renovated office and the other 1/4 was vacant. When that space was leased out it was rebuilt and one day in the middle of the construction all our network connections on the walls between our space and this other space suddenly stopped working. The contractors incorrectly assumed that these were old cables so they ripped them out. Needless to say they ended up paying to have new cables run, but that took a couple days...
The right cabling makes perfect feedline for HF radio applications. I removed well over 300 feet of Twinax from the building I work in, and I could take all I wanted for free. [I now feed a 40-meter dipole with it]. The loss characteristics are about the same is RG-8.
All you amateur radio operators/SWL'ers, offer to remove the stuff for free.
One caveat, it is really dirty work, depending upon the building.
In montreal, we have quite a few buildings where several companies are installed, and when it comes to cabling, you just can not install anything yourself. You rent the space, you rent the lines.
You need a new drop ? No problem, a contractor is on site to install them, label them, keep track of them.
It can lead to some pretty conflicts, but overall, when you get used to the fact that your responsability ends at the wall jack, it's a pretty good way to relieve us IT guys from one of the most boring area of the job.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
A. Limitation of Knowledge. The guys who do a lot of the wiring work don't know what the cables do -- believe it or not. My two most experienced, and best, pullers couldn't tell you what ethernet was if their life depended on it. Heck, I had one guy who didn't know what T568b was, but could punch down Cat5 to a T568b block in five seconds flat. All they knew was what they were told to install.
In the past I had specifically had discussions with them about pulling cables out. Unless they are explicitly directed by the landlord of the building (who knows even LESS than they do) they will not, and probably should not, touch cables that are pre-existing. This is due to fear of not knowing what they could be doing, and worse, what they are, or aren't, doing.
B. Cross-office runs. In one of my buildings, for example, each floor was an average of 12,500 feet. The average office was 800 sq. ft. Most floors had upwards of 10-12 offices on them. In order to get riser pulls (cabling run in the central, vertical risers of the building) to office drops (termination points for those cables), these typically ran over the other offices. It was typical for the first office, closest to the riser) to have anywhere from 20-40 cables running through their plenum cores that had nothing to do with that office.
Imagine you come in Monday morning, after a neighbor moved in that weekend, to find all your cabling (data, phone, cable TV, leased lines) had be removed by the overly eager data people.
C. Simple CBA. The bottomline for any real estate firm is, well, the bottomline. The risk of fire due to overly full cabling space is fairly minimal compared to the risk of losing money and facing lawsuits -- or worse, losing tenants.
The cost of pulling existing cabling plus the risk of damaging infrastructure minus the value of open space is just not in the favor of making the change. It's really that simple.
When all is said and done, with my engineering cap on, I'd like to see thorough documentation on cables and better diagrams of floors showing what cable goes where -- and it's really not that hard. But try telling a rushing tenant that they have to wait two weeks while your engineering team documents cables, yeah right.
Also, with my engineering cap on, I'd make one suggestion for anyone moving into a new office. If you are going to pull out the old cables, and it is in roughly strong strength, use it to snake your new cables! That's what we often did. There are a few snares with this trick to watch out for, but if you have good pullers they'll know what to do -- if you give them the green light.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
I've considered this idea more generally in the past... paying a 'disposal fee' up-front on new goods to pay for their end-of-life costs. There are two problems with this idea:
1: Technology changes, and those end-of-life costs are going to change, sometimes up, sometimes down. This in itself isn't a terrible problem, but it couples into problem 2.
2: Disposal escrow would wind up creating some huge lumps of money. IMHO, whenever there's a huge lump of money, there's also a class of people who will find a way to attach themselves to it and start sucking it dry. In other words, that lump will never survive to do what it was supposed to do - pay disposal costs. Relative to item 1, someone (from that class) will find a 'new technology' to handle disposal and use the fund to develop that new technolgy. Maybe it'll work, maybe not, but odds are that the point will have been to gain access to the money, not to develop technology. Let's presume that 50% of the time the technology falls through, and the money's gone. We're right back where we started, only with a broken promise and either an environmental mess or the need for another government bailout.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As soon as this issue appears on the radar screens of fire marshalls, it will be dealt with. Restricting air flow in the plenums and having materials which emit toxic fumes during combustion in suspended ceilings would get most firemen wound up.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
We actually had a flag day, a few years ago, when a load of new comm. gear came in. The comm. guys spent days pulling up several layers of old cable 'cos they needed the space for the new. It made working under the floor much nicer. Now if we could get the power guys to stop laying 100kg of copper on top of our phone and data cables.... (Yeah, a structured wiring plan would help.)
:-|
And whenever I retire a cable, or find that some less industrious person has abandoned one, I pull it up *now* before it becomes part of a mat that's too much to deal with. It's a great way to be productive late on Friday afternoon when you don't want to touch production software just before the weekend. But then, I actually fasten the holddown screws on connector shells, too, so I'm obviously a fringe nutcase.
> The problem I faced was, what about when you have to do both? (Run a distance on one floor, then go up to another floor and run a fair distance in another air space.) Either way you are breaking code somewhere.
If you don't want to break code, you split the cable at the turns, and use plenum for the floor runs and a section of riser cable for the floor change. Yes, it's inconvenient, but building codes are rarely written with convenience in mind. So, in a word, you don't use one long cable for that whole run.
Virg
There should be some legislation that makes it illegal to cut the lines without removing them completely. When you vacate a space, the wiring should either be useable or gone.
I like how the article pushes the "fire hazard" angle, but doesnt' bother to look at which cabling, specifically, is the problem. It portrays it as a problem caused by companies installing network/phone wire recently, when the real problem wire is much older. Most new wire installed by knowledgeable installers is plenum rated-- which means it's self-extinguishing and not nearly as toxic when burned. The nastiest-burning wire you'll find in ceilings is the old pink-beige jacketed 25-200 pair phone cabling that was installed forty years ago by Ma Bell! What's more, much of this nasty multipair wire can't be pulled out because it's still being used. On top of it all, the toxic-fire hazard posed by wiring in the plenum space is miniscule compared to the nasty plastic crap that's in an office itself-- if there's a fire, that cheap desk chair burning is gonna put out nastier smoke than a bundle of cabling. Also, plenum air doesn't generally get pumped into anyone's office. Plenum spaces are used as return-air systems, so any smoke in there is going primarily into the building's air shaft, where it will set off a smoke detector that sends the air out a roof vent rather than back into the building.
Don't get me wrong, as a network cabling installer I'm all for the removal of old cable. I've seen cable trays so packed with old crap that I couldn't get another run through. But the need of some people to pose every problem as a dire safety hazard drives me up a tree. I'm willing to bet that there are very few buildings where the communications wiring is even one of the top five fire-safety hazards.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
When I ripped out my Romex (steel covered cable) it was quite nasty... however, we had the drywall all down and pulled the plaster & lath down too so it was quite easy to see where things were sticking. Alot of the cable was cut in many places and removed from around the staples.
You will need to check with a local person as the codes vary all over the country.. not everyone enforces the NFPA rules or adopts them as local ordinances. Fire code in the US is a massive mess... thus we have the highest fire fatality rate in the civilized world...
According to the NEC 2002 ed, section 800.53(A) states that, "Abandoned cables shall not be permitted to remain." Section 800.53(B)(1) states the same thing. So, abandoned cables in plenum & riser spaces MUST be removed according to the NEC. Your local jurisdiction might have something different to say, but that's what's written in the NEC.
Since that's cleared up now, I can move on to your question, "...what about when you have to do both."
Section 800.53(G) & Table 800.53 state that you can substitue cable type CMP (communications plenum) for type CMR (communications riser). You CANNOT substitute CMR for CMP though.
So, the layman's answer to your question is to run type CMP when you have both situations.
Phil
Take all the unused cabling and thread unused AOL Trial CD's and you have yourself a great way to trim that Tree!
Dolemite
________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
I live in an old house (1840), in the UK, and when we had the floors up we found lead piping for gas lighting, which was the premium source of light before electicity came along.
After admiring the historical quaintess of century and a half old technology, we pulled it up and sold it for enough to cover some of the costs of the woodwork repairs, then laid down CAT5 (attenuation in stone is atrocious, especially for 802.11a, so CAt5 is the backbone).
I hope in another 150 years someone will find the cat5 wiring and find it equally quaint, as they laugh at 100mbit bandwidth and IPv4 net addresses. At least I hope so -as I doubt they will find as much resale value in the wires as we did in the lead pipes.