If you walked into a house and saw a lot of purple wire…what would you think it was? It was an invasion of an alien life form perhaps..? Personally, I didn’t have a clue! Luckily for me, attached to one end of the purple wire, was a man I could ask! Enter Isaac Birchall of Birchall Reality who kindly answered my questions. (Settle in folks, it’s an interesting read….)
What is all this purple cable for?
“Each of these cables connects to a network socket on the wall that can connect a till, a phone, a PC a digital display, a printer, or any number of smart/connected devices. We’ve placed plenty of these in the staff areas for staff computers and devices, and plenty in the main shop areas too so Lavinia Stamps aren’t limited to certain areas where they can put a till or a digital display for example. The cables also connect CCTV cameras and WiFi Access Points (those domes you often see on the ceilings) – with how old the building is and how thick the walls are, we need one of these domes in nearly every single room!
Roughly how long does it take for you to fit a mile of cable?
We pulled a lot of the cables one or two at a time, and some of them we were able to pull up to 10 at a time by using a cable reeler. Network cables like these are only allowed to be 100m in length at most before you lose signal quality, so none of the individual cables are long that that, but a lot of them come pretty close! Because the building is so old and has so many thick walls that we’re not allowed to drill through, steel beams that block the way as well as multiple extensions, it’s been easier to pull large bundles of cables up into the very top loft space and back down again to get them where you need them to go, which adds to the length of each.
The first rough-in (around 80 cables) took 6 days to complete. Some days we pulled 20 or more a day if it was a clear run, others we had to spend a lot of time using rods and string to pull a much smaller number of cables or just clearing obstacles in the way that we didn’t know about until all the old fittings and fixtures started getting removed. We’ve tried to hide all the cable runs as best as possible by either chasing them into walls, or threading them through ceiling and crawlspaces. The last thing a building this old and this beautiful needs is to be covered in plastic trunking! I’d say we’ve managed it for around 90% of the cable runs, which is a great result.
Are you doing this on your own, or do you have an assistant?
The first rough-in was done by two of us. Pulling cable over any kind of long distance usually requires a person on each end of a floor, wall, loft, or a crawl space. If there’s a snag or a complicated zig zag, it helps to have someone in a roof or ceiling space just helping cables around corners. Doing this many as a one-man job would have taken weeks, but then I’d have been very fit by the end of it running up and down 3 storeys hundreds of times a day. The final few cables are being done by myself as the building works are completed. The advantage of having builders on site when you need to get around a wall is that by the time you get there, they’ve usually pulled it down!Which room has been the toughest so far?
The toughest rooms are the ones where there’s no obvious way of getting from A to B. There’s no clear winner of the toughest room, because they all had their challenges… the place wasn’t exactly built with WiFi in mind back in the 17th century 😉Have you seen anything interesting in the walls so far?
We found some old newspapers from January 1983 that had been put in a wall space, presumably by whoever the builders were doing work at that time – 5 years before I was even born! They were in really good condition considering their age, which unfortunately can’t be said about myself!
How many miles of purple cable are you popping into the Cons Club?
When all is said and done we will have pulled almost 3.5 kilometres of network cable around the building. Wow! For those of us that need it converted that’s 2.17 miles of cable, all to make sure that Lavinia Stamps stays online! It’s amazing to think that those purples wires go a long way towards making that happen.
Magic job Isaac!
