Dodgy trade pictures for your amusement! - 1 Million Views!

You'd think they'd have used 'scotch' tape.........?

OK, I know......

Another top install. Large office block that has just had all boards changed and inspected and tested. ?

That's pretty tidy.
But speaking as someone who's installed a few network points over the years, it really pees me off when I've gone to great lengths to keep the network cabling separate from mains wiring - only to find the ****ing sparkies have gone and mixed there's in with mine ?

Simon47 said:

That's pretty tidy.
But speaking as someone who's installed a few network points over the years, it really pees me off when I've gone to great lengths to keep the network cabling separate from mains wiring - only to find the ****ing sparkies have gone and mixed there's in with mine ?

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I've always found it the other way round tbh

Network and alarm guys piggybacking on the electrical installation and paralleling with mains cabling

Been on a second fix today went to connect the outside lights up and found a dead short neutral to earth, though it may be the fitting but alas no it was the Plaster boarder using 3inch screws for 12mm boards!?

Had to move half a bedroom to find the spot, then measured where it was above and used a magnet to find the screw and remove it. I had to get it out to get the old cable out and new one back in! I love plasterers at the moment as you can probably imagine!?

Simon47 said:

That's pretty tidy.
But speaking as someone who's installed a few network points over the years, it really pees me off when I've gone to great lengths to keep the network cabling separate from mains wiring - only to find the ****ing sparkies have gone and mixed there's in with mine ?

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Can't say network 'engineers' work to anything like our regs, to tell the truth.
Admittedly, standards are falling badly all round but comparing some of the thrown in bunches of IT cables with mains installs is, in general, a bit of a joke.

Mikegh said:

I've always found it the other way round tbh

Network and alarm guys piggybacking on the electrical installation and paralleling with mains cabling

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Yep, we installed some steel conduit recently above an office ceiling for door access. The wiring in this office in installed to a very high standard and I intend to keep it that way. Steel conduit and trunking is used throughout the building, partly as the risk of fire and explosion is quite high, the nearby plant equipment operating at ridiculously high temperatures and pressures The door access was installed to a very poor standard, cables chucked over the ceiling grid, wires poked through gaps in walls where steel trunking passes through, mismatching accessories and surface boxes. They have run a load of network cables for IP cameras, I didn't want to look at how those were installed above the ceiling last time I was there.

I thought all network engineers worked to this sort of standard ????

Now let's see the other side of those patch panels when everything is connected! The test seems to be, it's all good if you can get the door to close...

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James said:

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I thought all network engineers worked to this sort of standard ????

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freddo said:

Yep, we installed some steel conduit recently above an office ceiling for door access. The wiring in this office in installed to a very high standard and I intend to keep it that way. Steel conduit and trunking is used throughout the building, partly as the risk of fire and explosion is quite high, the nearby plant equipment operating at ridiculously high temperatures and pressures The door access was installed to a very poor standard, cables chucked over the ceiling grid, wires poked through gaps in walls where steel trunking passes through, mismatching accessories and surface boxes. They have run a load of network cables for IP cameras, I didn't want to look at how those were installed above the ceiling last time I was there.
View attachment 89090

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Funnily enough I rewired one of these in a school a couple of weeks ago. They had a run of 40 odd meters in 0.50 flex slung across the roof voids, crazy thing you can walk around the voids and like yours it is all steel trunking in the voids with a route direct from the board to where it needed to be, rewired in about two hours using the trunkings already in situ.

Reminds me of another site, we tidied all the wiring up. Lashed in cabling was replaced with steel conduit, cables tied to overhead steel conduits were removed or installed inside the conduits. We removed the redundant circuits which left quite a large amount of space in trunkings and several 32 and 25mm conduits that spanned the room ended up empty. A tenant moved in and wiring was installed by cable tying it to the trunking and empty conduits. SMFH. I wish I could find photos of the existing conduit, a work of art. The conduit system must have been installed complete, starting at one corner. So carefully planned that there were no running couplers needed.

James said:

I thought all network engineers worked to this sort of standard ????

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Some of us do, or did, I'm not in that line any more.
At one client, I got handed this by the sparkies (they gave the network cable to the apprentice to do, totally unsupervised, and with even less clue than he had supervision) :

And managed to unravel it all, work out which was which (badly or not marked at all), and eventually turned it into this. I normally put the panels at the top of the rack, but there were a few cables "a bit short" - while there was another that went all the way to the far end of the building and half way back ?

This was the back of the panels for the phones (in house at a previous job) - mix of proprietary digital, analogue, and ISDN-2

freddo said:

Now let's see the other side of those patch panels when everything is connected! The test seems to be, it's all good if you can get the door to close...

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Better without doors IMO. Front of the in-house panels above - and all the cables colour coded (green for phones, blue for serial, yellow for network) and all recorded in a database. Not long after I left, someone decided that was too hard, ditched the database, and used all black patch leads (and didn't even route them neatly) !


With one client (a business centre), they had a right 'kin mess. We quoted to tidy it all up (we already did their IT), but the owner decided someone else was cheaper. To be fair, the other lot did a decent job, all nicely correct length patch cables, and all neatly cable tied together ? Yep it was nice and tidy. But I suspect that anyone with half a clue about structured cabling will be ahead of me as to the effect on being able to actually move anything ?

But yes, sometimes you can shut the doors ... almost (front side of the client job above). But all that does is keep the heat in.

f'knows what it looks like now, I'm sure they'll have had some 'kin cowboy sparkies in to add data points since I was last involved.

freddo said:

We removed the redundant circuits which left quite a large amount of space in trunkings

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Well there's one thing clients rarely want to pay for. It's a common problem to find that ducts etc are full - but no-one has a clue what's still in use and what can be ripped out. To do it safely usually means starting at the ends (i.e. where you know cables are terminated), and cutting them back as you go.
I suppose you could apply the Nakatomi Tower technique and then sort out what's not working ?
At a previous job we had a client who was a science park. They'll have that problem soon, if they don't already. They went through a phase where the park management didn't care who ran private cables between offices using the site ducting - and kept no records.

freddo said:

A tenant moved in and wiring was installed by cable tying it to the trunking and empty conduits. SMFH. I wish I could find photos of the existing conduit, a work of art.

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We once got a job where there was segregated trunking, conduit drops to each outlet, etc. But we were told we were explicitly not allowed to touch the trunking as they'd had BT in to install their cabling and they weren't prepared to risk any "finger pointing" in the event of problems. So we were using the drops in the walls, but cutting into the trunking to get the cables out above the ceiling and running them where we could. Clients eh !

Very good standard of work there

One thing that always puzzled me about data cables was multicompartment pvc trunking

It's functional but it's designed to parallel mains and data cabling which isn't really what you want to be doing

Prob no other option for most surface work

I've installed screened PVC trunking before, the data compartment was coated with copper. Super expensive.