Home Improvement → Re: Another Edition of "What's Wrong With This Picture?&quo

How did you hold them together? The lacing was a little heavier duty but still tied the cables together. Control panels and MCC's were full of laced bundles.

I don't recall ever lacing either AC power cable or the main DC bus cables (to the battery backup rooms). As far as I can recall those cables always ran loosely placed in enclosed raceways (usually with removable lids). The only tying of the AC cables was the strain relief at the end.

In datacenter wiring I have placed AC power cables in overhead power troughs (again loosely placed without tying). The only time they got tied down (with ty-wraps, not lacing) was when the power cables ran across an overhead cable ladder. Even then the power cables were not bundled up but tied individually to ladder rungs (side by side).

I'm not saying that lacing of power cables never happened, just that I'm not familiar with it (having never done it myself). I would think that it is more desirable to allow power cables to dissipate heat then to neatly bundle them together (which would allow heat to build up inside the bundle).

What did you use before tyraps? I'm not talking abut power wiring but control wiring, control circuit wiring etc. Surely you didn't have a spaghetti bowl of wires going all directions.
Maybe I should ask how old are you. Perhaps tyraps existed when you came along.

The topic of this thread was power cables. I'm sure industrial control systems at that time did lace the wiring but that is not something I ever did.

As for my age, old enough to have done cable splices with hammer and blow torch
PILC (paper insulated lead-shielded cable) telco dry-core cable. The hammer was used to shape a shell from a sheet of lead (fitting it to the size of the splice) and the blow torch was used to solder it around the cable ends. spoiler

I learned the fine art of cable lacing from Ma Bell. They had a real hard-on for that kind of shit at the phone company. When they decided cosmic frames would be the panacea to the old MDF, ty-wraps has come out. Those could only be used on poly jacketed cables, so the individual pairs were still laced all through the backside.

I agree about the ty-wrap tool - it's a gimmick. Panduit was literally giving them away years ago and I still have one somewhere.

Extension cords are now classified as power cables? Ok I have no clue as to what you would classify the other wires as. I've seen wires in service panels laced very neatly. I would classify them as "power cables".

Telco cabinets and electrical control panels that were laced were beautiful to see.

I worked on a 1.6Gwatt power plant. All the panels and trays(proper term??) were a sight to see. Miles and miles of wire. I wish I had the concession on zip ties, thousands and thousands of them.