Most of the time, businesses that move out of one building and transfer to another leave all their data cabling behind. One can usually find abandoned cables lying around the floors or dangling from the walls and ceilings of old IT rooms. It’s also common for inexperienced cabling contractors to leave a majority of the old cables where they are inside of performing proper cable removal. This usually happens when a company decides to upgrade their network cabling infrastructure.
Why Safe Cable Removal is Important
According to the National Electrical Code, cabling should be removed if it is not tagged for future use. Beyond that official mandate, there are other reasons why getting rid of unused and abandoned cables is the best (and most logical) course of action. For example:
1. It makes ongoing cable management more complicated
If you have extraneous cables scattered around your property, it’s difficult to immediately identify which cables are safe to use and which ones are dead-ended. It’s also harder to determine which are connected properly. As a result, managing your cables will take more money, time, and effort than they should.
2. Abandoned cables pose a fire risk
Too much old data cabling in walls, riser closets, and ceilings provide extra material that can fuel a fire, which altogether makes things more dangerous. Mixing old cables with live ones is all the more dangerous and should not happen under any circumstances. This is the reason why the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) made modifications to the National Electrical Code and added a requirement for proper cable removal.
3. You could fail in any fire safety inspection
Fire safety inspections are performed to check if your building is compliant with fire safety standards. As mentioned earlier, abandoned and exposed cables are a definite fire hazard. If authorities see any number of leftover cabling in the walls of your office space, you could ultimately fail a fire safety inspection and have your licenses or certificates revoked.
DIY Cable Removal: Yes or No?
Expert electricians will agree that it’s almost always cheaper to do a job right the first time. That is to say, if you don’t have much experience with proper cable removal, you should probably leave it to the professionals—otherwise, you may end up paying twice as much as you normally would just to get an electrician to fix (and repair) a botched cable removal.
Contrary to popular belief, there’s a lot more that goes into cable removal than just ripping out wires and closing up holes. There are a lot of things that could go wrong if you don’t have the right equipment or experience. For instance, you might remove wires that are still working properly, completely damaging your current cabling system. You might miss a whole bunch of wires, causing complications in future installations. Or you might mix up live wires with dead wires, creating a much bigger fire hazard on your property. Don’t get yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place; call a licensed professional immediately rather than risk DIY if you’re not 100% confident in your knowledge and skills.
One other great benefit from hiring a certified contractor for cable removal is getting a written warranty. Almost all licensed electricians are insured and bonded, ensuring a virtually hassle-free for the process before, during, and after the actual cable removal.
1+1 TECH has years of experience in handling these kinds of situations. Our certified cabling technicians can assess your property to check which cables should be removed and see if there are cables that are still operational.
Are you planning on moving into a new office location or simply renovating your space? Then it’s the best time to invest in cable removal. If you’re not sure how to deal with unnecessary cabling in your building, feel free to contact us and schedule an onsite inspection.
