Cable Removal Tips Wanted

Demo work with the least amount of liability occurs when starting at the end farthest from the closet or patch panels. Using cordless drills start by unscrewing plates and cutting terminations (jacks, bnc's, fiber connectors, rg6 connectors, etc). Once the cable is free from its far end termination point, it is easy to ID bundles heading to the closet.

Those that don't come easily are easy to ID and investigation is simple in verifying whether the cable penetrates to another floor, is a control wire (hvac) or alarm cabling.

This is easy work for unskilled labor. You can even provide a roll of caution tape to mark the cables that require further investigation for those more skilled.

It is hard to tell a floors history and from your installation experience keep in mind that tenants do the darndest things when handling things in house. I've seen both HVAC and security cables terminated on patch panels and tied into 66blocks for sending out remote alarms to property management, alarm companies, etc.

Same goes for working in a raised floor environment. Starting at the far end removes 99% of all issues and also alleviates from having to open every other tile up.

Surveys are good. They will allow you to verify how good, bad or ugly the closet looks. You will also be able to verify if the tenant wants the jacks and plates left in to use later as drop strings. In a raised floor environment, you'll be able to see cable management. Whether they used ty wraps or if the cables are just laying in a tray.

Hope this helps...

Jeri

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote:

Jeri, Thanks for your suggestion to start at the far end. I can see how this would reduce potential problems, but from the description of the job I'm not sure if I will be able to identify the obsolete cables unless I start at the rack. I'll check this out especially when I do the site survey.

I want to open up the raised floor to see what I'm dealing with. It's easy to do and cables can sometimes get hung up on electrical boxes especially if they get a kink in them.

I've been asked for a "not to exceed" estimate. Do you th>Demo work with the least amount of liability occurs when starting at

-- Bob Simon Please remove Xs from domain for direct replies.

No.

Since you ignored the above answer, it's unlikely you will read this one, but why would you open up the entire floor for any reason? The point of a raised floor is to provide a raceway and to hide the cables. It's unlikely that they used cable ties every 3 feet and dobtful that they used hangers every 4-6.

THe real question is not how many calbles you can mine per hour, but how many cables you can identify as dead in an hour. You only marginally care about the in-service cables, you're more concerned about the dead ones. If you can ID 100 cables an hour, you ought to be able to mine at least half of them in 2 man yours. Remember, your customer claims there are 9000 cables under the floor that need to be removed.

THe thing you have to ask your non-survey customer is how he expects you to know which cables to remove. Is it because the cables are cut dead under the floor, or do they go to unused drops, or is he cutting the amount of drops in half, or are you hiding some obsolete cables in the floor.

However you determine which cables are to be removed, the procedure would be to free both ends and then work your way toward the middle ofs the room. If you absolutely know from the patch panel end which cables get mined, then work into the raised floor from that end. If not, you'll have to work from the drops toward the mdf.

I wouldn't take more that 6 workers.

Carl Navarro

As far as quoting this sort of a job for the customer I would try to get a small pilot job approved first, say, (2) 2-men crews for a week under customer's supervision if they want. You can really make the pilot job a "not-to-exceed" job as the cost of your labor is fixed for the known time. After the pilot job is complete you can gauge it and see if any reasonable estimate on the whole job can be given at the time. If not - do another small one.

This pilot job will also become your hands-on site survey and I am sure on a 10K cables job there is no telling what you will uncover and no survey will actually show that unless you actually are removing cables doing it. Additionally, you will get paid for a survey in a sense. Try it. It worked for us in the past. The customer should be reasonable enough to understand that removal jobs are almost impossible to give a fixed quote for (not-to-exceed is one of them 'cause you always end up at the high end of it)

With the percent of dead runs to live runs, and for your peace of mind, you might want to think of removing all the cables and starting from scratch. With the shear number of cables, you are bound to mis-label some live runs as dead. The removal will be easier and quicker and you know that all the runs when you are done are done right. Why risk your reputation on what someone else did.

Same with this one, Ted. I thought I was going through some kind of time warp. The cable removal issue has been long resolved.

Carl