Cable markers - what do people use?

[gof1]

You must have a very steady hand!

I just put single lines as in roman numerals for 1, 11, 111, 1111 etc that normally enough for rings, or italics it works for me and have been back to instalations consumer unit changes years later and the marks still visible, my hands never been that stable lol
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But just loked at your marker looks simple and nice in one colour , may get one of those handy

 

[Deleted member 105166]

I just put single lines as in roman numerals for 1, 11, 111, 1111 etc that normally enough for rings, or italics it works for me and have been back to instalations consumer unit changes years later and the marks still visible, my hands never been that stable lol

... and there was me visualising you as a calligrapher, delicately scribing circuit numbers onto 2.5mil
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I just put single lines as in roman numerals for 1, 11, 111, 1111 etc that normally enough for rings, or italics it works for me and have been back to instalations consumer unit changes years later and the marks still visible, my hands never been that stable lol
[automerge]1568567077[/automerge]
But just loked at your marker looks simple and nice in one colour , may get one of those handy

They're OK, a bit fiddly to line the numbers up for double digit circuits on thin cores.
I do like the look of the Partex ones Dave linked to, I hadn't seen those before.

 

[gof1]

could be worth having a chat with city salesman to try, prefer no colour/clear background or white.

 

[Darren Evans]

Thanks everyone, some food for thought and various options available! Going to try some Partex ones I think!

Re: the additional cost, I fully intend to be known as the electrician that goes the extra mile, as I know from experience that this is what gets repeat business, not the price the customer pays (up to a limit of course!). It's the same reason I always try and fit an emergency bulkhead light near the board where practical.

 

[davesparks]

could be worth having a chat with city salesman to try, prefer no colour/clear background or white.

I much prefer the coloured markers, I find it much easier to identify the colours than to read the little numbers, especially when you are working on a joint box with a few circuits in with poor light.

 

[James]

Wow, there are more joints in there than the whole of Amsterdam

 

[telectrix]

I much prefer the coloured markers, I find it much easier to identify the colours than to read the little numbers, especially when you are working on a joint box with a few circuits in with poor light.

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dave. that should be exhibited in the National Gallery. It's a work of art.

 

[Simon47]

I didn't think you were allowed to post pron photos here
Sad thing is when you come back a few years later and find some **** has bo****ked it all up

 

[davesparks]

Wow, there are more joints in there than the whole of Amsterdam

Only 96 circuits in each box,

And only 3 got mixed up in the process!

 

[Toneyz]

I much prefer the coloured markers, I find it much easier to identify the colours than to read the little numbers, especially when you are working on a joint box with a few circuits in with poor light.

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Now that's a job that would justify using them

 

[WallaceP]

Thanks everyone, some food for thought and various options available! Going to try some Partex ones I think!

Re: the additional cost, I fully intend to be known as the electrician that goes the extra mile, as I know from experience that this is what gets repeat business, not the price the customer pays (up to a limit of course!). It's the same reason I always try and fit an emergency bulkhead light near the board where practical.

That’s a nice touch fitting an emergency light. I have never seen that in a domestic before. Well played ?

 

[Simon47]

Only 96 circuits in each box

OK, I know it's not a bragging thread, but a couple of jobs ago. Sorry about the picture quality, taken with my phone which at the time only had a lousy camera.

The front, middle rack has phone connections at top and ethernet hubs at the bottom. Racks either side have connections to network outlets - heading on for 1000 including the small rack in another building. Patch leads all colour coded - yellow for ethernet, green for telephone, blue for serial (we still had heading on for 100 serial terminals and printers back then), and red for "don't even think about unplugging that" circuits

Back of the phone connections. Different wirting for different connection types (analogue, digital, ISDN). Needed a crib sheet to keep track of how to wire those.

And the back of the racks with the bundles of cables coming down the cable tray and fanning out to the patch panel connections

I liked when people would take a peek in the server room and express about how complicated all that wiring looks. Each cable has 4 pairs in it (when in form, I could manage just one or two errors in 100 outlets (two ends each)) - but all the same and all connected the same, so really not complicated. The most complicated was the phone system where the digital extension ports used one pair each, the analogue extension ports also used one pair each but to avoid needing adapters at the user end I added ring capacitors on the back of the panels, and the ISDN ports used two pairs each and I doubled up so each port has two sockets on the patch panel (an ISDN-2 connection can have more than one device on it).

The most "fun" part of that job was when a department manager would call and say "we've just moved, can you come and re-connect us". It was then a drop everything else, work out where their users had been connected to before they unplugged everything, and move the patch panels to where they are now sat.

 

[Simon47]

Oh yes, and coming back to the topic of the thread. If you look at the last two of those photos, you'll see that I used labels (Brother machine) to identify the cables with little flags. This was before they brought out "flag tape" with a different glue, and sure enough, a lot of the flags have come unstuck