I am showing up a bit late to this discussion, but I can't resist.
I carried a cross-connect caddy everywhere I went. It held up to five reels of wire, unless one of them was three pair. I was a color-code freak. Ed can confirm that..he has visited most of my installs since I retired. Here was my method. I stuck to it most of the time on large installs.
Blue/white...analog phones (reserved orange white for large jobs)
Red/white....digital phones
yellow/blue...co lines
red/blueand red/orange....ancillary equipment such as paging speakers, service observing, etc.
My pet peeves when it came to cross connect...loops too big or no loops at all. Not enough Spindles which meant wires crossing the top of a 66 block, looks bad. Cross connect wire bundled. Keeps you from being able to gently pull on it to trace it. I used the 66 rings, the half circle things that snap on a block and you run the wires behind them.
If my frame was in a not so good closet where other things were there, like a sink or something, then I used plastic covers on all the blocks. If the block was 25 pair from a system, then I used the orange covers. All my bridge clips were the plastic covered pairs, easy to remove by hand not with needle nose pliers. I used a color code for them as well. I had white for analog, red for digital. Green for other things.
For me..hanging blocks, arranging station wires, cross connecting, this was my time to make a work of art, with the goal that when a tech other than myself came to the site, they could understand what the wiring did and where it went.
I flagged my station wiring as well as labeling the block.
I miss installs sometimes, until I remember how hard it was getting to see it all, and how sore my hands, feet and most things in between were the next day.
Last edited by Derrick; 01/17/17 09:55 AM.
www.myrandomviews "Old phone guys never die, they just get locked in some closet with an old phone system and forgotten about"
Retired, taking photographs and hoping to fly one of my many kites.
