Cable Installation

[asalcedo]

I have purchased a large house in Spain.

It was built five years ago to a good standard.

I need to bring a telephone cable from the fence surrounding the property to inside the house. The cable is for telephony and ADSL. There is no fixed line telephone service at the moment.

The house has plenty of wiring and plenty of junctions boxes where plenty of different diameter and color corrugated conduit tubes meet.

Even the telephone company technician, which has the telephone line cable ready just at the fence of the property, could not find which junction boxes to open and which conduit pipes to connect with a fiber glass fish tape.

I have asked the architect that did the house but he referred me to the electrical company that did the wiring. This company does not have the drawings of the wiring and the specific person that did the wiring is no longer at the company.

I am left to figure out how to do it.

Anybody with experience can give me some inputs as to how to best approach this problem?

So far I have opened all the junction boxes that I think are relevant to the situation.

I have one near the centre of the house where all the telephone cables from the house's internal telephone installation converge. They end there. So it seems that they are ready to be connected to a PBX for example, and to outside lines. That junction box does have several empty conduit tubes. Some of them with stainless steel wire inside ready to be pulled.

I have pulled those wires but have not seen any moment in the wires of the junction box near the outside wall of the house, which would seem to be the logical place where at least some of the other box's conduits should end. This box near the outside wall is also the nearest to the boxes in the garden that seem to connect the boxes in the garden near where the telephone company's wooden post is located.

I don't have a fiber glass fish tape but will buy one. I need at least

25-30 meters long. Which one is the best?

I have thought of using a vacuum cleaner connected to one end of the empty conduits to quickly identify if the conduits ends in other boxes are the same tubes. Will this work?

Many thanks,

Antonio

[Tim S]

asalcedo coughed up some electrons that declared:

This is probably the best way to start.

You might even be able to use the vacuum to suck a ball of tissue paper or cotton wool through, tied to a light flexible piece of string (natural, rather than plastic string would work best).

Then use the string to pull 2 small ropes.

One rope can be used to pull the phone cable. The othercan be tied up at both ends for next time :)

HTH

Tim

[Andrew Mawson]

meet.

relevant

cables

conduits

Antonio,

Send me two return tickets and a hotel voucher and I will come and sort it out for you

AWEM

[R]

Smoke.....

or more safely the smoke machines DJs use. Connect to the conduit end and watch where the resulting smoke comes out.

[asalcedo]

PROBLEM SOLVED.

The vacuum cleaner did the trick.

I put a piece of toilet paper at the entrance of each of the empty tubes in the box near the outside wall.

Then I placed the vacuum cleaner hose in each of the empty tube ends in the box at the centre of the house.

When I saw that one of the pieces of toilet paper had disappeared, I knew which pair of tube ends were connected.

I did the same between the junction box near the outside wall and the box near that one outside in the garden.

The telco technician with their fish tape will do the rest....

[Andrew Gabriel]

Likely to be too much resistance to reliably tell over 30 metres. Given the conduit is plastic and the draw wire is metal, you could rig up a simple battery and bulb and another 30m length of wire to do a continuity test to find matching ends of the draw wire.