Ok, so I haven’t yet buried extension cords, but I have a piece of 12/3 SJOW that I suspended with some clothesline between the house and woodshed. I hung it with steel S-hooks which was a major pain to install; fiddley little S-hooks and all. (See pic.)
Today I fell a tree and brought the whole thing down.
So I have to do it all again and I don’t want to redo all those durn S-hooks, hence the question. What’s a better way to suspend an electrical wire from a steel cable? Remember UV exposure is an issue.
Thanks.
Replies
What you need is one of the spinning wheels like the fone company still uses on rare occasions. Or you could use UV-resistant zip ties, if you can find some.
I'm just surprised you haven't gotten 5 responses asking you
if you have a permit,
what does your BI say,
you need to have a licensed electrician....and
you need an electrical engineer
I think zips ties would work fine. UV will make them brittle but even plastic stuff will still not break unless you fiddle with it. Besides, they would be easy to replace.
>>>I'm just surprised you
>>>I'm just surprised you haven't gotten 5 responses asking you if you have a permit,
Haha... maybe the "junkhound" title scared them away!
>>>Besides, they would be easy to replace.
Not really, at least with my current setup. The suspension wire (clothesline) is quite high, and I don't trust it to lay a ladder against, so replacing snapped hangers is a beech.
Last time I crimped the S-hooks on the extension cord, and used a rope & pulley to pull it across. I would pull the rope, hang a hook, pull the rope, hang a hook, pull the rope, etc.. until the extension cord was drawn across. It worked OK, but I wonder if there's a better way.
And a mechanical engineer, to analyze the stress on the cable.
(Black plastic zip ties generally last longer than the clear ones.)
IS there a reason you couldn't just braid the two together? You might have to provide some kind of transition where the hanging cable goes its own way from the electric to avoid chafing but the rest of the way I would think it would be fine if wrapped tight together.
The problem is that unless you wrap the two quite tightly there is a tendency for slack spots to develop and pull the slack out of the rest of run. So you have most of it very tighly wound and a spot multiple feet long where the cable is hanging loose.
>>>IS there a reason you
>>>IS there a reason you couldn't just braid the two together?
Yeah, I've thought about this, and it's a good idea...either weaving the two together or wrapping a light spiral cable around the suspension cable and extension cord.
The only problem is raising the darn thing because it becomes so heavy. It's way better if I can first raise, then tighten the suspension cable, then scoot the (heavy) extension cord across. Raising both wrapped together, and achieving a good degree of tension is tough.
I wonder if the REAL Junkhound could make you a spinning wheel?
>>>I wonder if the REAL
>>>I wonder if the REAL Junkhound could make you a spinning wheel?
Can't say I've heard of this mechanism. How's it work?
It's a gizmo that clips on an an overhead cable. As it's pulled along with a rope a wheel circles the cable and wraps it with wire. (The trick, of course, is that the gizmo has to be removable so it has to circle the cable without completing a full circle.)
The cable companies around here use them to wrap their cable and a hanging wire together. If you knew a cable company guy, you might talk him into leaving his van open one friday night......
Duplicate post.