Underground cabling guide

Bring in the Pros. Do not try this on your own. Put this out to bid for local firms. There are a lot of environmental and technical issues that need to be addressed.

I once had a client who had run in a fiber cable on his own between two buildings. The conduit flooded his main comm room on the first rainy day. I had to replace several thousand dollars worth of equipment in the main comm room. This was not their first major self inflicted problem. Their PBX was destroyed and their vendor voided their maintenance agreement and fired them as a customer.

The fiber termination kit that they bought for the job and training of their maintenance man to use it ended up costing more than having a subcontractor do the job.

Professional assistance and guidance is the way to go.

You need to consult the following (and understand them) before you even begin.

National Electrical Code.
Local Building Codes.
Miss Dig (or whomever deals with marking existing underground utility lines in your area)
Department of Natural Resources (or whomever deals with land use and environmental issues)

At a minimum, you need to install burial rated cable in conduit / sheathing at a depth that protects it from landscape digging.
Here in the semi-frozen northern US, all burried lines need to be below the "frost-line"

I would start by getting recomendations from the project electrical contractor. They likely have had to deal with this before, and would have some sub-contractors that they would recommend if they do not handle this themselves.

Chas

My scenario is like this. I am currently here in the Philippines and as you see we are in a tropical environment. The problem that we might encounter is constant rain and that may enter through our conduits. This "to be" building is on 700 sqr meterlot, warehouse style with 1 server room, 100 target workstations, security systems, phonelines. The building of the structure will be divided into 4 phases, the server room being last(which I think should be the first). I would like to know how we should lay out the cables, what kind of pipes, how to protect it from pest, sealed it from probable flooding, and will the DC powered Belden 8723 for security system affect UTP data transfer. Contractor intervention will only be on the lay out of the pipes, we were given responsibility of doing the cabling design. Thanks for helping me push out this one.

Point value changed by question poster.

Just a little toss in:
If you are attempting to interconnect two buildings for LAN/WAN connectivity only, consider directional microwave, such as that from Breezecom. If the buildings are farther apart than what is feasible to run cable, you may also consider a point-to-point link from your local telco and P2P service provider.

The only thing I can add is use metal conduits. If you use PVC or other plastics, there's a small chance some critters would chew through the pipe... or tree roots

If the buildings are close with good line of site you could save some money and use a wireless link between the sites. Wireless speeds now range from 11, 50, 100, and even 1000 mbps so speed is no longer an issue with wireless and you don't have toworry about it getting dug up. I would recommend a spare unit and get some sort of extended warranty on the units if available. I use wireless all the time and love it.

Please take note that it is a single building(LAN) and the requirement is underground cabling.

hi, i am also from the philippines. our warehouse is more than 100 meters from our main building. from our office from the second floor, i have installed a switch at the ground floor, have the irrigation crew, dig a trench around the building going to the warehouse, install a pvc pipe for my conduit, install a weatherproof box at the middle (for my switch to work around the 100 meter cat5 cable limitation). and another switch at the warehouse. everything works fine as of the moment. :)

This question was auto closed due to inactivity