30 July 2008

Home networking basic tools - Part 3


Okay, now you got your cable and crimping tools ready, you also know the tools you need to run the cables inside your walls, then all that you need to have for your home networking tools is cable tie.

What?!? why would I need cable ties. Yes you don't actually need cable ties to do home networking, but you do need them to make your cabling neat.



Making your cables neat



If you're running a whole lot of bundles of cables in your home, cable ties definitely things of your choice to neat your cabling work.

What people usually use are these following types of cable ties:

















The one on the left is the velcro cable type, and the next one made of plastic or something (well, kinda plastic-like material)



You can use any one of those two, the difference I may say is the velcro is definitely more expensive than the plastic cable ties.



And also, the velcro cable ties are usually preferred for managing sensitive cables such as fiber optics cables. It's because the velcro type ties are not giving too much pressure on the cables, which is very important for cables like fiber optics.



The picture on the right shows you the velcro cable tie used to manage a bundle of fiber optics patch cords/cables.

Yup, they're all orange, good for the eyes, I mean if you're long enough working on network installation, at some points you'd be very very sick just seeing a LOADS of grey UTP cables. Ah yes, UTP cables do come in various colors nowadays.



Sometimes if you use plastic cable ties, you know when you got too excited, you might tied the cables too tight which maybe cause some cables cut in the middle.



This happened to me once, I was sure I crimped the cables right and it took me quite a while just to figure out that my tie was causing the problem.

Thanks to the Fluke Meter I had, I could know that some cables are cut at the point I tied using cable tie.





I hope this is informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.