atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring conduit vs wiremold

I have a project that requires about 150 drops all surface wiring.
the hallway will have 55 drop in one direction and 66 in the other trying to decide which way to go

large wiremold 4"x2" if I can find it
3" pvc conduit
2- 2" conduit each way

open to suggestions

Conduit would be cheaper. Wiremold may look better. Have customer add a drop ceiling?

We have always used Panduit products. Their T70 raceway is rated for power so in school settings it works very well. It is pretty spendy though.

Definately raceway (Wiremold, Panduit, etc) with appropriate fittings and boxes if it is going to be exposed.

I don't know how you would break out the individual drops with conduit, at least in a way that looks acceptable and professional without sending a lot of money on big boxes.

-Hal

Shannon and Hal are on the right route. Several manufacturers have the size wire way you are looking for. It also has inserts for voice/data/power as necessary.

Look, I know that everyone will laugh at this one, but I got away with doing this about ten years ago at a private school. Bear with me here:

We hired a seamless gutter contractor to produce long lengths of "crown molding" down each side of the hallways. We had them fabricate continuous standard 5" aluminum gutters for the length of the hallways. These were mounted with about a 1/2" gap from the ceiling, allowing additional cables to simply be "dropped-in". At each classroom entry, an EMT sleeve went through the cinder block wall between the back side of the gutter and a Wiremold box on the other side of the wall. From there, it was just plain old V500 surface Wiremold to the outlet(s).

The electrical inspector gave it his seal of approval for this project ahead of time. Sadly, the building has since been razed to make room for new housing developments. It looked pretty cool though, especially after the painters blended it in with caulk and matching wall paint (they were repainting the hallways that summer).

The hall already has conduits that have been put in for power, cable and fiber. I will us wiremold in rooms but thought cost wise conduit in hall with breakout boxes at each wall intersection so I could feed 2 rooms from each box.

Merritt
Post some pics when you get done with this.

Well, if the "decor" has already been established then go with conduit.

-Hal

We had a long time customer of ours call us last summer with a unique project. Their operations center was on the 3rd floor of an old county court house build back in the 40’s. Now on the 3rd floor they had drop ceilings and things where good. But they had leased the 2nd floor which had solid ceilings and walls with concrete floors.
On the second floor there was 15 rooms approximately 20ft by 20ft that had one 110v 2-wire plug-in in them all wired in series with no voice and data. Can anyone say “Push-O-Matic circuit breakers…………that’s how old this building was.

And they tell us that they need 3-voice drops, 3-data drops and 4-110vac drops with one of the 110’s dedicated in each room. The V/D would need to go back up to the 3rd floor to tie into their existing network and phone system. So lucky we where able to find an open (the last one) 200amp service open in their electrical distribution panel on the 2nd floor which happen to be just below where their data and phone system was on the third floor.

So to make a long story short we came out of the wiring closet on the second floor with 4 inch 4-channel Hellermann-Tyton raceway at baseboard level and put the voice/data and ac in one raceway. We would bore through from one room to the next room at baseboard level then start again around the room. When we got done you could walk into those rooms and never notice the raceway.

Ed,I too have used gutter, and downspout.

Mike, I liked ITE (Bulldog) Pushmatic breakers and panels. They were the only residential-grade panels that used bolt-on connections. I don't remember ever seeing a bad breaker in them. An now back to our original programming.......

Hey Ed, what about FPE? No bad breakers in those, yeah right!
LOL

Properly installed receway always looks better than conduit.

We have had several jobs with no pathways the past two years and we used a 2-inch X 2-inch outdoor type molding used by CATV installers. It worked great. We did a school in L.A. with nothing but cinder block walls, ran the cables outside above the height of all doors, then drilled into the classrooms through the top of the steel doors. You can fit a lot of cable in these things. I just went through my past invoices looking for the part number, can't find it but I bought the 8 foot sticks (and covers)from TVC Communications stocking warehouse in L.A. https://www.tvcinc.com