Recently, I decided to make use of the large conduit and pull cat5 network cable from one vacuum inlet into the closet that houses the central vacuum system as well as my "work in progress" wiring closet.
In the wiring closet, I cut a section of the vacuum conduit where the wire would be coming in.
My wire pull was going to be about 60 feet or so from my desktop to the wiring closet.
During my first attempt, I tried to push a fishing tape through the conduit. I may have gotten halfway, but I think the friction and tight 90 degree turns stopped the fishing tape in it's tracks.
IF I couldn't push something through I was going to pull it through. I went to Lowes and bought some masonry string and some heavier rope.
The first thing I did was to tie some washers to the string. Then connected my shop vac in the wiring closet conduit and turned it on. I went back upstairs and fed the string (with washers) through the vacuum inlet. I could hear and feel the suction from the shop vac. 3-4 mins later, the string was through! SUCCESS.
After attaching the network cable to the string, I tried to pull it back through. I may have gotten half way through the pull and it just stopped moving. Eventually I pulled the string and the wire apart. The friction of the string was causing a cut to form in the inlet conduit.
I repeated the same process with the heavier rope. I got the rope through with ease, but hit roadblocks when pulling the network cable back through. The cut in the inlet conduit was getting deeper. When I pulled the rope back out after failure, it was warm and had melted in some spots due to friction. I can only assume that there were multiple 90 degree turns in the conduit causing a ton of friction when I pulled.
I gave up and just settled on wireless, which was really good, but not as good as a wired connection.
Over Christmas this past year, an old friend was in town visiting. This topic came up and I told him my tale of woe of how this tiny wire couldn't pass through this giant conduit. He laughed and said, "Dude, just get some wire lube and it'll slide right through." I'd never heard of such thing.
So I gave that a go, except this time, I recruited some help. My dad came over and fed the string while I waited for it to get sucked into the shop vac.
String came right on through with no problem. We tied it off to network cable. I started pulling the string through and he was lubing the cat5 cable as it went into the vacuum inlet. We hung up a few times due to the string getting caught in the aforementioned friction cuts, but that was remedied by him pulling the wire back a foot or so. A short time later, maybe 7-8 minutes, we had pulled about 60 feet of cat5 network cable through the central vacuum system. Wire lube was the answer!
SUCCESS!!! An hour later, after punching down some wires, I had a wired connection from my desktop to my wiring closet.
But wait, there's more....sadly.
The central vacuum wall plate is not standard, so my keystone plate didn't match up to the holes. Also, the vacuum screws are much larger than your standard wall plate. Currently, I have one vacuum wall plate screw holding my keystone plate on. Google has not returned any results for an adapter or anyway to kludge a good fit.
If anyone knows a good fix for the wall plate mounting, please let me know!!!
TLDR Version:
- Much easier with 2 people
- Attach small weight to string
- Suck string through conduit with shopvac
- Pull cat5 network cable back through using WIRE LUBE!!
- Wire lube was the key to my success
- If you have a solution to match a standard keystone plate up to central vacuum box, please let me know!
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