The run that will not go in without breaking something.
Heavy coax through a full conduit. Fibre up a riser in an occupied building. A bundle into a finished house with nowhere obvious to route it. On jobs like these, what separates a clean pull from a damaged cable is experience and the right kit, not effort.
Four kinds of run.
Heavy coax
Hardline and larger coax will not take a tight bend, and they will not forgive being dragged. The whole job is how hard you pull and how tight you bend. Bend radius is the tightest curve a cable can take before it is damaged.
Fibre
Inside buildings, up risers and between floors. Pull fibre too hard and the damage does not show up until you test it. So we test it.
Bundled copper
Several Cat 6A runs into one pathway, without squashing any of them. A badly pulled bundle fails certification even though every cable looks fine.
Residential retrofit
Into a finished house. We use existing chases, closets, cold air returns and the attic before anyone talks about opening a wall.
Three things that ruin a cable on the way in.
- Too much tension. Every cable has a limit on how hard you can pull it. Go past that limit and the inside of the cable changes shape for good. It does not snap. It just fails the test later.
- Bend radius. Every cable has a tightest curve it can take. Bend it tighter than that and you have damaged it, even if nothing looks wrong afterwards.
- Sharing a pathway badly. Run a cable next to the wrong thing, or drag it over a sharp conduit edge, and you cut into the outer jacket where nobody will ever see it.
Certified afterwards, not assumed
We certify copper on a Fluke Versiv and measure fibre for optical loss, which is how much light the cable loses end to end. That is how you find out whether a pull went well. It is the only way anyone can honestly tell you it did.
Before you ask.
Do you do outdoor boring or trenching?
No. Underground work between buildings is a different trade with different equipment, and we would rather point you at someone who does it properly than take it on.
Can you pull into conduit that already has cable in it?
Sometimes. It depends on how full the conduit is, what condition it is in, and what is already inside. We look before anyone promises. A stuck pull in an occupied building is an expensive afternoon.
Is this a standalone service or part of a build?
Both. It is usually part of a cabling or fibre job we are already doing. A pull on its own is fine too, if that is the piece you are short of.
Can you work in an occupied building?
Yes, and it is most of what this work involves. We schedule riser and corridor work around the tenants rather than through them.
Tell us about the run.
What the cable is, roughly how far it goes, and what it has to get through. That is usually enough to say whether it is straightforward or interesting.