By Patrick Mclaughlin
Over the final two weeks of 2015, we here at Cabling Installation & Maintenance, along with the staffs of several other titles published by our parent company PennWell, moved our corporate offices. The fact that our new office is about a quarter mile down the road from our old office is of little consequence. We experienced everything that goes into an office move and, as you probably know all too well, there's not enough room on this page to describe it all in detail.
When we arrived at our new workplace on December 30, we took a tour of the place, admiring the freshness of everything. I even got to stick my head into the equipment room because even though all the cabling was completed, some final network connectivity quality-control was underway. And while I didn't get the opportunity to chat with the crew that installed the cabling systems in our new office, I knew exactly where they were and what they were doing on December 30. They were about a quarter-mile away, at our old facility, removing the cabling that had been put in place 17 years earlier.
As we have documented many times over the years, it is a violation of the National Electrical Code to abandon cabling when vacating a facility. Abandoned-cable removal became a requirement with the 2002 edition of the NEC. In the years since then it has become a regular course of business for installers (removers) of cabling; it also has become a necessary budgetary line item for companies, like ours, that leave a facility.
In the article that immediately follows this one, Chris DiMinico weighs in on a proposed revision to the 2017 edition of the NEC that would, he opines, add "complexity, cost, and confusion of the cabling requirements, safety, and Code enforcement." The specific proposed revisions DiMinico calls out are those that would add the requirement to install cables rated "LP" for certain circuits that will transmit Power over Ethernet.
We scratched the surface on this topic in our September 2015 issue, and something tells me that Chris DiMinico's article this month won't be the final word we publish on it. The 2017 NEC revision process is in a fairly advanced stage. As always, we will keep you up to date as we know more information. Based on the tone of DiMinico's article, this topic is likely to directly, and maybe dramatically, affect designers, installers and owners of cabling systems.
Patrick McLaughlin
Chief Editor
[email protected]