Going underground to save money
When it came time a few years ago for me to get serious about our equipment layout and improving the efficiency of the facility, there was only one person to call. Bob Zelin. For those who don’t know Bob, he is about as “old school” of a television engineer as they come. He is famous (infamous?) on the Creative Cow website for being a complete straight shooter who does not sugarcoat his opinions. It is considered an honor to be “Zelin’d” with his trademark zingers.
But the cool thing about him, is that he’s totally embraced all that computer based editing has to brought to production AND he loves saving money where you can. Not to mention he’s one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met.
So we’re building this new facility from scratch and since we’re going to have drop ceilings, my original thought was that will make it super easy to run all our cabling up over the top. Well, yes it will make it easy BUT in order to do this, I would have to purchase all plenum cable. See it’s a fire code thing. Cables (audio / video / network) create a toxic smoke when they burn. They could literally knock out or kill someone in the event of a fire. So in to meet fire codes and to run cables through the ceiling, you must run plenum cable which does not burn nearly as easily and when it does burn, it does not give off the toxic smoke. The thing about plenum cable is that it is very expensive. Much more expensive than running standard cables.
So another option is to run cable trays along the hallways. Here the cables are exposed as many of you have probably seen in production facilities. They’re just huge trays and it’s ok to run standard cables in the trays because they are accessible and not hidden in the ceiling. The obvious advantage is that all the cables are right out there and easy to get to. The disadvantage is that I would have trays running all over the facility and it won’t be nearly as neat.
So Bob suggested I run everything underground. I can run standard cables AND the runs will actually be shorter because they will not have to go up over our 10 foot walls to get into each room. They simply come up out of the ground and into the rooms. Honestly had never heard of this and when I mentioned it to my contractor, he said, “Oh yeah, we do that all the time.”
We plan to run a series of 6″ pipes through the ground and what you do is run a string through the pipe to facilitate pulling cables through. Even after the building is up and running, we will be able to pull additional cable through the pipes using the string.
This was truly a “you learn something new everyday” moment for me. So there you go. To save money, dig deep!
Comments are closed.