Tacking cat6 cable to walls

[ARW]

Part P changed in April 2013. Kitchens are no longer special locations.

[Andrew Gabriel]

It only appeared in the wiring regs about 10 years after the data communication cables and protocols in use became immune to such interference.

I might worry about things like single-ended alarm cable, but not properly used Cat 5 or later, or RS-485, all of which are designed to be used in such environments.

[Peter Crosland]

He is being very short sighted. If there is a future fault then the work and cost of fixing it will far exceed the cost of conduit now.

[Dave Liquorice]

Agreed, and the chances are if it ever needs fixing it will be not long after the plaster has set and the second fix testing is going on. Either because plaster kicked the cable with the float or the cable was duff in the first place. The former may take a while to show itself if there isn't a complete core break, the corrsion will need to eat away the copper...

Oh and Cat6 to run at full spec is a bit more fussy about bending radius, it has a plastic former down it IIRC. But why bother with Cat6, Cat5e will do gigabit, bung it in conduit and you can use it to pull in fibre later. But make sure you have no more than one swept bend in each conduit segment or pulling stuff will be harder than it has to be.

[Johny B Good]

That was good advice with co-axial cabled systems such as cheapernet back in the bad old days of 10Mbps ethernet when you had to worry about earth loops. Modern Cat5 Cat6 doesn't suffer this problem so can be run in and amongst mains cabling with impunity.

This is just as well for me since that's exactly what I had to do to upgrade my cheapernet to CAT5 [1] about a decade or so back in order to run the cabling between floors from the basement through to 2nd floor levels using the the same routing as the mains wiring to avoid adding additional trunking for the sake of an extra CAT5 cable or two.

That was a sensible requirement set by the GPO (and its reincarnation as BT) mostly to avoid the need to disturb customers' mains wiring and reduce the risk of electric shock during installation and any subsequent maintenance visits. That it reduced the opportunity for common mode crosstalk to become an issue was a side benefit more than anything else.

I've never read "Part P". I think that I should, if only to learn how to bypass the need to waste money in meeting its requirements on subsequent alteration work.

[1] Truth be known, the upgrade was essentially an exercise in using the old co-ax to pull in the new CAT5/6 cable(s).

In a domestic property, even one as large as our Victorian semidetached 3 floor plus basement dwelling, the shared run yardage couldn't have been more than 5 or 10 yards at most. It certainly wasn't enough to present a problem to the old RG58 cheapernet cabling (the type most likely to suffer from mains hum induction issues).

[Johny B Good]

More accurately stated:

"You can take _more_ liberties with UTP cable without affecting performance."

I would say a minimum bend radius of 1cm on cat5/6 cable would be perfectly fine, even if you had a dozen or so such bends in the run. Really, in this case, it's more a case of aesthetics than for anything else.

If you have to run the cable around a brick wall corner, you would follow the cement/mortar line and slightly undercut the cement/mortar joint on the corner to achieve a bending radius of 1cm without too much effort or compromise of the pointing.

[The Medway Handyman]

If the data corners too fast, what will happen then?

[polygonum]

You're Müllered.

[Andrew Mawson]

Well with explosive cord fuse if the corners are too tight the progressive burn/explosion fails to make the bend and fizzles out :)

Andrew

[Tim Watts]

That was never a problem when I was a kid and made natural-string-dipped-in-sodium-nitrate-and-dried "cartoon" fuses.

They really did burn like in Tom and Jerry. Possibly because I guess that's more or less how fuses used to me made...

[The Natural Philosopher]

There will come a time when kids ask why email has a strange icon that looks like a square with a folded down flap on it..

[polygonum]

We non-USA people have been wondering what that strange thing is that seems to signify presence (or absence) of mail. Some sort of semaphore/flag and a bird's nesting box?

[Tim Streater]

Well quite.

And then there's these people:

whose icon is one of:

1) a bin for general rubbish 2) A bin for depositing what people pick up after their dogs

Either way, certainly nowhere I'd post a letter.

[The Natural Philosopher]

[polygonum]

Even then, the picture does not convey everything. Does the flag automatically get lowered when the thing is opened? Does the postie have to manually raise the flag? If something too large for it gets delivered, do they put it on the ground at the base of the pole? What is shown when there is mail for collection but nothing delivered?

[Tim Streater]

I think, BICBW, that it's a two-way flag. Postie raises it when leaving mail, you retrieve mail and lower it. You raise it when leaving mail for postie, he lowers it after taking mail.

[Andy Burns]

How would postie know the difference between you leaving something to collect and you being lazy by not retrieving the previous delivery?

[polygonum]

Quite. We need the full details.

[Tim Streater]

[S Viemeister]

Yes. It _should_ work that way, but many of the newer posties don't understand that.