House in Progress Diary

Pulling Cable

With detailed plans in place, AJ came over the other evening and helped pull the structured wiring thoughout the house.

Our Approach
We focused on the runs to the second floor, and started by setting up the cable spool on a makeshift cable reel.

Then we ran a nylon cord down the PVC raceway that I'd installed from the basement to the attic as part of the project prep. I attached the cord to the end of the structured media cable with electrical tape.

Pulling the Cable
AJ headed upstairs to pull the cord through the PVC while I stayed below to help feed it up and through.

After we'd fed enough cable upstairs, we ran each one across the rafters and down the wall to the location where the individual access outlets will be. At each of these locations, we had already attached metal "mudrings" to the studs. (Depending on local electrical codes, you can also use metal or plastic electrical boxes instead.)

We pulled four cables to the second floor. We cut the cable back at the panel in the basement and marked both ends with colored electrical tape so we could easily tell them apart.

After finishing the second floor runs, pulling the cable for the first floor was much easier. Everything ran along the basement center beam and between the floor joists up to the first floor outlet locations.

Lessons Learned
While this wasn't a complicated task, we did discover a few tricks along the way:

• Make your raceway pull cords twice the length of the raceway itself, then nail down each end. We didn't at first. After we pulled our first cable up and through, we had a tough time getting the nylon cord back down the raceway. Learning from our mistake, next time we attached the bottom of the nylon cord to fishing line so we could pull it back down each time.
• Be careful when weaving the cable around obstacles. Two or three times we pulled the cable without noticing we'd gone the wrong way around a pipe or joist. Going back wasn't time consuming but you do feel dumb...especially the third time!
• If you've got any bends in your raceway, consider buying wire pulling lubricant. We didn't, and by the fourth cable we were working pretty hard to shimmy the cable through.
• Get the largest PVC raceways you can. Four of the 3/4" bundled cables were about as many as we were able to get through the 3" PVC pipe. Technically more should fit that size raceway, but since ours had several elbow joints, each subsequent pull became increasingly difficult to force through.

Materials Used
- Nylon pull cord
- Mudrings or electrical boxes for each outlet location
- Wiring pulling lubricant (optional)

Up Next
Two things remain for the structured wiring project: terminating the cable at each outlet location and setting up the modules in the structured wiring distribution panel. Stay tuned! :-)

Posted by aaron on September 4, 2004 at 12:52 PM