Cable guy in a tree

[Terry]

I know it is just an insurance claim commercial, but I love to point out stuff that just doesn't happen when I see it on TV.

The commercial shows a car swerving into a guy on a ladder. The ladder is leaning against a tree. The guy falls and drops a handful of CATV cable. Anyone else think that you should not be using a tree to run cable?

[Bob F]

Seeing how they string cable around and through houses, it sounds par for the course.

Bob

[betsyb]

[<josh]

My parents and their neighbors both have Comcast cable hung from trees,

60-80 foot Doug Firs.

The neighbor on the other side doesn&#39;t have cable hung from a tree, but the cable guy had to climb the tree to feed the line through the branches.

Until fairly recently, one neighbor also had his home&#39;s electrical drop hung off a tree.

[Eigenvector]

That sounds like an incredibly dumb thing for the cable company to do. Among other things, Douglas Firs are famous for shedding branches during wind storms, as well as upending

I mean if there&#39;s nothing else around to suspend the cable okay I guess you have to do what you have to do, but dig a trench and bury it as soon as possible or erect a tower. Better that than having the deal with a broken line every time the wind blows moderately hard.

[Larry Bud]

Geez, do you have 365 days of permafrost? Nobody ever heard of a shovel?

[mm]

Then the cable rests on the limb that&#39;s one branch lower.

Then you get channel 182 on channel 2, and channel 3 on 181. No biggie.

But I have never seen cable hung from a tree. This thread is amazing.

[Eigenvector]

Or more likely taking the cable down with it.

Or more likely taking the cable down with it. Why would a falling tree change the channel locations before it ripped the cable out as it passed on by branches flying.

I would have thought that was categorically illegal since like the invention of cable TV. Not only would it make your house a nice road for all the insects and animals living in the tree, it would make the repairman&#39;s job infinitely more difficult and dangerous.

[John Gilmer]

As others have pointed out, cable "drops" are often the minimum to get the job done. We have a townhouse which is a rental. The "latest" cable was run in some conduit. The conduit is one the surface in the middle of the back lawn. Previous "installs" had the cable just lying on the ground at the fence. Of a 40&#39; run to the distribution box, only about 10&#39; was barely underground.

Why so sloppy? My guess is that cable is the FIRST thing folks drop if things get tight. Also, from time to time, the dish looks better. I guess from experience the "cable guys" don&#39;t bother to even test a cable that hasn&#39;t been used for a year or two.

>

[mm]

The rest of yours sounds pretty amazingly bad, but afaik &#39;barely underground&#39; is underground enough. I watched and my cable was put in just with a wiggler, a vibrator of some sort that puts the wire no more than an inch or two underground with no other digging and the lawn is put back togehter just by walking.

24 years and it hasn&#39;t popped out yet. I haven&#39;t used the cable for more than 10 years, but my neighbors use theirs and I haven&#39;t seen anyone back there replacing thiers.

[<josh]

That&#39;s mainly true of Doug Firs in new developments, trees that used to be inside a forest of other trees, and whose roots have been badly weakened by grading, trenching, etc.

In my parents case, the trees are only about 70 years old, my mother planted them in the back yard as a child. There hasn&#39;t been any significant disruption of their roots, and they haven&#39;t grown wind- sheltered branches that fall off when the shelter is gone.

The phone lines have hung from the trees since the 1950s without any breaks, and cable has been on them trouble-free since the 1980s.

Trenching in the cable anywhere near the trees would certainly encourage them to up-end in the next big wind storm.

I&#39;m always amazed to see new housing developments going in with trees predestined to fall on the new homes because of obvious root and soil damage.

[Tim Smith]

That seems awfully shallow for running a cable under a lawn. What happens if someone wants to remove dandelions? Isn&#39;t there a big risk of stabbing the cable with the dandelion extractor?