Power Cables and CAT6

Un-armoured network cable, like  bare   telephone cable, needs proper segregation.

The really nice thing about the armoured stuff is that it brings its own earthed metallic enclosure with it, assuming you install it correctly. Not as much hassle as running it in steel conduit, but from both an EMC and an ADS perspective, pretty much as good.

Ordinary CAT 5 and CAT 6 cable, like T&E and PVC flex, isn't necessarily waterproof.


If you pop them in ducts, and they become submerged for a couple of days, they might just not work.


External cables are available for this purpose.



In terms of the networking equipment itself, even just popping a few metres down the garden to an outbuilding might just pop anything on the network in a surge event - I know a lot of people this has happened to at home. Perhaps this is OK if the cost of stuff attached to the network is relatively inexpensive, but SPDs might, of course, help.


Echo the segregation recommendations, noting that separate ducts are usually recommended for data.

I ran in a few hundred metres of Cat 6 cable for a customer and made the glands off a long run of Cat 5 SWA run underground to the electric gates for the audio visual intercom and to operate them.


The Cat 5 SWA was gel filled and I needed the wet wipes and roll of blue paper towel to hand as I worked.


I only did the donkey work, a satellite tv guy came to get everything working.


Andy Betteridge