Cat 6 cable without insulation (jacket)

[Patrik6765]

Hi i am running a cat 6 cable around 30m (100ft) thru an all ready put conduit which has a power cable for the garage which is not a part of the house and i want ethernet in garage to. The normal cat 6 cable is to thick to fit inside but if strip the insulating layer (jacket) the wire barely fits is it ok for the cable to be without the insulation only copper wires .

 

[Kid.Lazer]

There's no way you could pull 100' through tight conduit without damaging the individual wires, especially if there are any turns. If you have the wire to spare and you want to try, go for it. But I give it a 99.9% chance you'll be wasting your time.

 

I also just realized, you really shouldn't run your ethernet parallel to (and in the same conduit as) AC lines, if that what's you meant by "power cable for the garage."

[Skiiwee29]

Extremely bad idea due to the EMI that will be introduced by unshielded wiring running alongside power lines. You will have a LOT of problems just from this. Best bet is to trench new pipe to house your ethernet runs AWAY from the power lines.

[SpookyCitrus]

No. I wouldn't. Are you removing the inner layer of insulation off of the internal wires as well? Cat 6 Ethernet cable should be several color coated smaller wires inside of a single thicker insulation layer/shield if you strip the insulation layer off and it's just a single coper wire that is not an ethernet cable. If you are referring to having just the individual color coated wires exposed and trying to pull those through, still no. You're going to have a bad time, they're not very strong by themselves and running them through conduit would be a major pain in the butt. I would suggest trying to find a thinner power cable that you can replace the other one with. If you can't do that run a new conduit system or do the old PVC pipe trick and run it under ground from door to door then run the cables along the walls. 

[Patrik6765]

1 minute ago, Kid.Lazer said:

There's no way you could pull 100' through tight conduit without damaging the individual wires. If you have the wire to spare and you want to try, go for it. But I give it a 99.9% chance you'll be wasting your time.

Thank you but do you know if the cable can still work like that without the insulator just the jacket and the plastic in the middle separating the wires 

[Applefreak]

4 minutes ago, Patrik6765 said:

Hi i am running a cat 6 cable around 30m (100ft) thru an all ready put conduit which has a power cable for the garage which is not a part of the house and i want ethernet in garage to. The normal cat 6 cable is to thick to fit inside but if strip the insulating layer (jacket) the wire barely fits is it ok for the cable to be without the insulation only copper wires .

No, you don't want cables exposed to each other, especially when one is a live one. Either drill a new hole, use wifi or powerlan to connect the garage. There is room in case the power cable needs to be replaced. You never ever run more than one line per tube. If the insulation on both are damaged at some point, you can create short = fire. The other effect will be that the signal will be really bad, so bad that even bad wifi is a better solution.

[Kid.Lazer]

The twisted pairs as well as the twisting of the entire cable is kept intact by the center cross, as well as the outer jacket. It would probably decrease performance, but it would technically work, assuming you could make the run with damaging anything. That, however, is not an assumption I would bet any money on.

[Patrik6765]

1 minute ago, SpookyCitrus said:

No. I wouldn't. Are you removing the inner layer of insulation off of the internal wires as well? Cat 6 Ethernet cable should be several color coated smaller wires inside of a single thicker insulation layer/shield if you strip the insulation layer off and it's just a single coper wire that is not an ethernet cable. If you are referring to having just the individual color coated wires exposed and trying to pull those through, still no. You're going to have a bad time, they're not very strong by themselves and running them through conduit would be a major pain in the butt. I would suggest trying to find a thinner power cable that you can replace the other one with.

I thought removing just the outside insulation leaving the induvidual color wires .The power cable needs to be in that spec and i cant make new conduit thank you

[SpookyCitrus]

Just now, Patrik6765 said:

I thought removing just the outside insulation leaving the induvidual color wires .The power cable needs to be in that spec and i cant make new conduit thank you

Yeah, the cables aren't strong enough to run through conduit by themselves. If you can't run new conduit and can't get the cable to fit with the outside insulation you're next best bet is to probably just go for a mesh WiFi setup, or use range extenders to get WiFi to reach the garage.

[Patrik6765]

11 hours ago, Kid.Lazer said:

There's no way you could pull 100' through tight conduit without damaging the individual wires, especially if there are any turns. If you have the wire to spare and you want to try, go for it. But I give it a 99.9% chance you'll be wasting your time.

 

I also just realized, you really shouldn't run your ethernet parallel to (and in the same conduit as) AC lines, if that what's you meant by "power cable for the garage."

Do you maybe know if there is an adapter or somethnig that could work with 2 "thick" copper wires the ac cable has 5 wires and i am using only 3

[Applefreak]

5 minutes ago, Patrik6765 said:

Dou you maybe know if there is an adapter or somethnig that could work with 2 "thick" copper wires the ac cable has 5 wires and i am using only 3

I'd really give power lan adapters a try before messing with wiring. If the wiring in your home is solid, chances are you can get pretty decent speeds with those adapters. If you absolutely must run ethernet or a fixed wire to the garage for some reason (security?), consider a fiber optical cable. Those are not transmitting power, are quite impervious to magnetic interference and are thin enough to probably work. However you will have to have adapters, probably switches, on both ends to terminate them into regular copper RJ45 connections. The wiring is fairly reasonable even over long distances but the connectors and the switches will be somewhat expensive.

[OhioYJ]

1 hour ago, Patrik6765 said:

The power cable needs to be in that spec

As in up to code? Usually LV and HV lines can't be run together? This depends on where you are obviously. Usually per code you wouldn't run them in the same conduit. Also you would want communication lines crossing power lines are 90 degree angles, and not traveling with them, otherwise you are likely to create interference (noise).

[Patrik6765]

33 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

As in up to code? Usually LV and HV lines can't be run together? This depends on where you are obviously. Usually per code you wouldn't run them in the same conduit. Also you would want communication lines crossing power lines are 90 degree angles, and not traveling with them, otherwise you are likely to create interference (noise).

I meant the wire needs to be thick and i cant change it for a smaller one thank you anyway 

[PyCCo_TyPuCTo]

Sounds like that conduit is too full, if you attempt to pull anything thru it you're likely to burn and damage the other cables.

Also, you should never run AC and data in the same conduit, high voltage cables will induce EMI into low voltage cables.

As for removing the jacket, this will render your cat6 cable useless, or even if it somehow works after that it will cause you tons or line errors. Reason being is that the twists of individual pairs as well as all 4 pairs twisting together is important to cancel out EMI. It's called "twisted pair" for a reason.

[Needfuldoer]

Don't run low voltage data lines in parallel with line voltage power in the same conduit. You'll have terrible interference and it's against code in most places.

 

You also don't want to strip the jacket off of UTP cabling. Each pair of wires carries a balanced signal, and letting them shift out of place can disturb the signal integrity. (Just having continuity isn't enough past 10 meg Ethernet.)

 

You need a separate conduit or data run.