The year is 2005, and the new National Electrical Code is officially out, and the 2002 edition moved up the ladder into field use. So, it is now really-really required to remove those abandoned cables (or tag them "for future use"). Has anyone been successful in selling this idea to the customers? I personally have nothing to brag about except for some small jobs. One of the problems I'm been able to identify so far is: how do you price it with so many unknowns? The second major one is: who's gonna pay? Landlord? Tenant that's moving out?
Anyways, if someone has any success stories to post here, please do. Looks like a potential business opportunity, if approached correctly. Let's think together about what works and what does not.
Some really great questions. I'm also interested in learning the answers people are facing as they try to sell this to the customer.
As far as marketing tips, or "how do I sell it to my customer?" I would look to your local permitting agency. If the inspectors are going to include this in their inspection criteria, then you have "somebody to blame it on" as it is now required by the local Authority Having Authority.
A second way to look at it is to try to sell it as a life-safety issue. The building owner and tenants are required to do everything possible to protect their employees / tenants and leaving old, abandoned cable in the ceilings adds fuel for any fire that may get started. This is a similar sales approach to adding the cost of firestopping.
As far as pricing cable removal, I would base it on the number of cables to be removed. While you probably can't get an exact count, base an estimate on the amount of labor to install a similar number of cables. If you can haul off the old cable, then there may be additional revenue from selling it as scrap. Sometimes even old patch panels can be reused if the customer tells you "take out what's here." Giving old patch panels to charitable organizations can result in a tax write-off which is reflected on the company's bottom line. Rodgers Platt
Thanks for posting Rodger, let's keep this thread going. I know there is gold above that ceiling; we just need to figure out how to get it!
Oh yes, we do really press severe on the "life safety" issue! Problem is: people don't consider it an issue unless they know someone has been fined for non-compliance, and we, unfortunately, don't have an example yet. I honestly have not heard about anyone having been fined for this neither here in PA nor nationwide. This would be the valuable bit of info I'm looking for.
On a side note: I think it would not help as much to learn that someone has actually died of the chlorines exhumed by the cable as to learn that someone has been fined $90 (or better yet $900) for not removing the stupid cable. Having been involved with the issue for couple years already, I would say it is really disheartening to see how much people don't really care about safety UNLESS IT IS ENFORCED!
Anyways, correct pricing is still an issue: on average it takes about two times less time to remove cable than to install it, but there is always a "BUT": there is a great degree of unpredictability involved. An abandoned cable gets entangled with a live one, you yank it out, and your neighbor?s T1 goes down. That's my biggest fear coming into these types of projects. I'm not even sure our insurance company would be happy to know that we are taking such risks all day long removing the old cables.
Another issue that has been identified so far: it requires different work force. If you send your best techs removing cable, after couple hours in this dust you easily get them de-motivated and you'll pay through the nose. On the other hand a person should know what he's doing to avoid pulling a live cable out, so you can't just take anyone from the street. We have not yet been able to identify a proper mix of experienced techs and laborers to do this job. The last one should be read: we are paying through the nose for a rather un-sophisticated type of work being done by people clearly over-qualified for the job.
About selling the scrap: at our (only one known to us) local facility a pickup truck-load of scrap copper cable yields a case of beer. Though useful for a company picnic, it does not really justify a business case. Interesting detail: you'd think they recycle the copper: na-ah, they recycle the PVC and make garden accessories from it.
Or you pull down a suspended ceiling, or pull out a poorly secured 120v wire, or break a fragile solder joint on a sprinkler pipe, or.....
The main reason cable was abandoned in place was the hassle of getting it out.
What does the code say about abandoned cable behind plaster or sheetrock where removal might mean cutting into walls to removed cable anchored down to entangled with good?
As a follow-up, here is the language I had written into a Blanket Statement of Work for the government entity I help with their telecommunications. Perhaps it will help someone in either writing their own specifications or provide some insight towards marketing cable removal.
"(c) The Contractor shall remove any existing telecommunications cabling in any space that is either abandoned or displaced as a result of the installation of new telecommunications infrastructure under this Statement of Work."
While this single sentence is only a part of a much larger document, it shows how to specify the removal of abandoned cables in a job requirements document. For those of you who are working with customers in defining their requirements, you can point them to the NEC and show them the paragraph requiring the removal of the cables. From there, it is a simple step to modify the above statement to fit their specific requirements.
And no, the entire Statement of Work will not be posted as it is a proprietary document.
That particular statement has been a part of our Blanket SOW since August 2003, so yes we have received many bids for work that included the statement.
To answer another item, yes some bids have varied widely, those mainly from new contractors that haven't worked with the City before. The cost of cabling has gone up since we included the statement, but not significantly more than the normal esculation of labor and materials. If you attempted to do a direct comparison of costs, I would estimate about 15 to 20% is added for labor to remove old cables.
Reread the statement to see exactly what the requirement is before you start talking seperate contracts for cable removal. The statement is very specific about what is required.
I think what's going to happen is this: your potential bidders will go ballistic (I know I would). How do you think it is possible on a 2hr (even, 5hr, not the point) pre-bid walk-through to identify the amount of existing cable to be removed? How do you even know that the cable is indeed abandoned without working closely (under a contract) with IT, phone, security and other departments? So, here is my set of scenarios where it is leading you:
#1: You are going to receive terribly over-priced bids because people will try to cope with lots of uncertainty
#2: You are going to receive wildly different bids (I would say way more than 50% difference), which is going to be a bitch to decide on, and your chances of picking a wrong contractor that's just screwed up preparing the bid are too high. If you do pick a wrong contractor indeed, you'll end up either firing him in the middle of the project (spells HUGE extra expense, we are fixing up someone?s low bid at a school right this moment) or get a project with every corner cut, everything from sloppy workmanship to questionable origin of the materials installed.
#3: (my favorite) People will say (rightfully so) that the bid was tailored to the company that used to have your service work for years, came to know your facility and thus is the only bidder able to guess reasonably on the amount of abandoned cables. Your bid will be called unjust, and your boss will receive a call from a concerned citizen. In case of a very thoroughly concerned citizen IRS will receive a call, too, to take a closer look at the possible contractor pay-backs.
#3.1 Here is a flip-side of scenario #3: Even if you are your own boss and could care less about concerned citizens, by being too much loyal (tailoring bids to) to a single vendor you simply jack your own costs up! In my mind, I would try to mix fresh blood in every time I can, just so the contractor of your choice has that feeling on the back of his mind that he is not alone in the Universe.
I think you are referring to the clause that sates that the removal is associated with the new cables installed under the SOW. I guess, you are right: that should ease the tension as you can approximately quantify the number of cables to remove by the number of panels you are getting rid of to install your new ones.
And I still think that your tried and true contractors have a huge head start by being able to guess much better on the conditions they'll meet when they remove the old ones.
The cost increases you observed (15%-20%) can easily be explained by labor costs only or by recent plenum price increases or by the fact that you might have upgraded your spec from CAT5E to CAT6 recently, and not the additional labor to remove existing cable. If removal introduced any additional cost here, I would say that it is so negligible that your contractors are practically giving it away.
Giving it away for free is NOT what I want to do with cable removal part of the business, but rather put a reasonable price tag on it and run as a business entity in its own right.
Thanks for the scoop, Rodgers, I greatly appreciate that! It is very important to know that you might be competing against people that may be willing to do it for free ;-)
The difference in labor costs, or at least what we assume are mostly labor related, is due to the removal clause as the cable spec of Cat
5(e) hasn't changed in almost 5 years. We have had some people come in an propose Cat 6, but that price is almost always a 40% increase in material and labor over a Cat 5(e) install. That doesn't mean that some agencies don't install Cat 6, but they usually pick and choose which offices / sites are wired to Cat 6.
The usual practice here in this city is that every site is completely recabled about every 5 years. Not because the old plant went bad, but because they constantly change office configurations. I have had some offices where they have replaced the modular furniture twice in 3 years, recabling over 100 cubicles each time. And that doesn't count the number of times one agency will move out of a building into a different facility and the new space will be redone as well as the old space by the backfill agency. All told, I estimate the city spends over $1.5MM on new cabling projects each year.
The particular building I work in is about 15 years old now. The building was originally wired with Cat 3. Our particular suite was rewired with Cat 5 in '99 and will be completely stripped and rewired again later this year as the space is renovated.
About 7 years ago the city invested over $30 million to upgrade the desktop with Cat 5 cabling and new telephones. Took us over 3 years to work our way through the entire city and we are still cleaning up after shoddy / botched cable jobs. As we again update the telephone system we have the opportunity to go back and address the problem areas.
No gold for me - I get paid by the hour, and I'm already booked solid. The problem I see with some of this is that the ceilings often have cabling that's in contact with the asbestos fireproofing so if you move it, you have to practice asbestos abatement procedures. Right now, the maintenance people and I are not allowed to do work in some bldgs because of this. And some of our bldgs have literally tons of the old
25 pair IW cable from the old key phone systems that were abandoned in the late '80s. I would really like to remove that stuff, but with the asbestos..
neither
someone
Exhumed? I think that's when you dig a dead and buried body up for forensic examination.
Can't brag about overbooking myself, so any additional opportunity is welcomed.
Thanks for the insight. I did not think of that before. I guess, you can always cut them flush with the firestop device. Otherwise you'd have to worry about re-firestopping, so just cutting the cables at this point sounds logical to me (unless disapproved by the firestop device manufacturer)
When you talk about really old cable you start getting into weird situations. When AT&T broke up and deregulation took hold at some point it was "decided" that the wire in the walls belonged to the local provider. You were even supposed to call your local phone company and ask them to officially abandon it before ripping it out. (We did this in Pittsburgh in the 80s and you could tell by the voice at the other end they were tired of the question.) At some point I think some, most, maybe most all, of the local carriers officially abandoned it to the building owners. But if not and there is a fire safety case, I imagine it could get strange in the lawsuits.
Honestly, the only way anybody is going to make money pulling cable out is by paying off the local town electrical inspector to go to the site and tell the customer it has to come out. Until that happens I dont think its a large market for now.
Firestop? I don't think the telcos knew what a firestop was back then. And all that IW is not plenum, and it's in a bldg that has a plenum ceiling. :-(
Well, you don't have to pay him (on top of whatever local taxes you pay) to tell you to keep all your ceiling tiles closed. So, why would you pay him to tell you about another fire hazard? But I think that his education is important. He's not going to demand it if he has no idea about this "novel" concept.
Until the electrical inspector starts to bring a ladder to check out the air spaces and what not, I personally think its a shot in the dark to get steady cable removal business. I know of one company, where we put Cat 6 in that wanted to old stuff removed, and that was for asthetic reasons, not because of any hazards.
Then again, I dont go out there and push enough either.
While I was still cabling, we'd always remove the old stuff we couldn't use when doing work for new tenants. 9 times out of 10 we'd get the landlord to pay for this portion of the work. Price wise we'd just charge time and materials + 10-15%
Worst job we ever did was removing all unused cables in a 250,000 square foot, 5 story building. Took 4 of us nearly 2 weeks and netted nearly 2 tons of old telephone cable, mostly 2 pair. Removing the cable from the riser facilities was a bitch and most cables had to be removed one at a time, one floor at a time.
The angle we took with the landlord was in pointing out the riser facilites - 2 4-inch conduits with pull boxes at each floor's telco closet - were maxed out and the majority of the cable was unused and of almost no future value.
As a "bonus", the landlord has us pull 100 pair feeders from the MPOE to each telco closet once the old stuff was removed. Good job all in all, but a real PITA to get done. I have no idea how I'd bid a nightmare like that.. If memory serves, the total removal job was around $15k and about $5k to do the feeders.
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