 So I did a video about these thin little patch cords and they're pretty novel and the video is pretty popular and I like them and of course I said I don't know Electrically enough about these so an interview was put together With Dan from ideal networks who does know a whole lot about cabling standards And that's a great interview and it will go way more in-depth about cabling standards And I'm gonna get today. It was enlightening hearing from him They also from ideal networks. They sent me this this is the ideal networks POE pro And this is a really slick little device that I wanted to review and talk about POE testing so The person I did the interview was part of Company that designed this and so this is a really neat device that I wanted to show How it loads these that's why he sent it to us so we could do demonstration with it and talk about it I'm just like this is really cool. This is definitely something that's now added to our Tool kit for our technicians. I don't even playing with it for a couple days now, but I'm pretty excited about it But first we're gonna go crazy here and do something everyone does. We're gonna read the manual Okay, we're not gonna read the whole manual We're gonna cover a couple topics in here those I wanted to show off how this system works and Talk about the POE standards the tests and I'm not gonna cover everything in detail does take a 9 volt battery I'll cover the physical parts of it and what comes with it in a second here But in the manual they got you know well documented shows some of the accessories you can get which are cool It does come with the dual port remote units, and then you can get more of them, etc, etc But the POE testing is what's really neat So it does some of the other testing which we'll cover for cable length and shorted pins and that's less exciting But the POE Doesn't just test the PE we first when we plug in PE it's gonna be able to test the PE It's gonna be able to test the Ethernet speed Then this is where things get cool. It identifies the different types of PE we AF AT BT maximum wattage the Pass or fail we'll get to that in a second the pins that are carrying it and the class of POE and number of pairs supplying PE voltage Method of operation the PE pro operates by detecting pulses from PE power source equipment These pulses advertise the PC class which determine the amount of maximum power it can supply So if you're not familiar with active POE or how a system works like the one behind me here that we're going to be showing with this Unified POE switch that it allows for Different classes to be identified and maybe you don't have it in your head right away because I know I don't always But there are several different types of PE in different classes of PE determining on a voltage So when this does the POE testing It's not just testing for whether or not the wattage comes out It identifies the class and passes or fails whether or not it provides voltage as the class that identified So that's actually really nice that way it isn't just hey We got voltage on here. No if you have a class of device It tells you whether or not the class that it identified itself as is putting out the voltage It's supposed to and that's an important feature And I like the fact that it gives you a pass or fail based on that So it's not like just just power coming out of it It says I'm a class this and this is the wattage that class should provide so it passes or fails whether or not that wattage was provided We're gonna go out show a couple tests on that now one other thing it does is an extended load test To activate the extended power test by holding the network button for three seconds until a beep is heard This feature will draw up to 90 watts of power and can be Activated once a POE measurement has been made Starting with the power detecting during the automatic pewee test the pewee pro will increment the power demand in Approximately five watt steps until the PSE powers down or 90 watts is reached each power step will be played for half a second Now what that's telling us is this will load test it And that's actually really a neat feature because there's voltage and then there's voltage under load and voltage under load is What happens when I plug something in it's not just providing some weak amount to go and hey Here's your voltage you asked for it's what it looks like when you load it up based on the class based on that pull now I don't have a 90 watt pewee system to do a test with but one of the things that said it can do is if you test 90 watts it will go all the way up to that high in here But it will eventually cause this to get warm. Don't worry. It's got safety protection error so I tried testing on this 30 watt one we have here quite a few times and was unable to Overload this but apparently it will get warm won't damage you at all Just let you know that it's hit like a thermal limit and we'll blink on the screen letting you know wait for it to cool down And it will probably get slightly warm to the touch, but doing 30 watts never even come close to that It never even got warm at all, but I thought that was kind of cool It does have safety protection built in because when you're drawing well 90 watts That means you have to dissipate the 90 watts not going to come in the form of heat now that we've played enough of the manual Let's go through the physical layer show you what this comes with and get it unboxed and actually do some testing with it So as sent to us it did come in this cool little retail box, which is nice. It's it looks pretty and It comes with this handy-dandy case with this being rubberized and embossed So this is not a sticker isn't going to scratch off that's on there really well We'll unzip it Inside we find This those a 9 volt battery in here, but we already put it in it is a Phillips head to get that out So it's not going to fall out on you very rugged eyes to rubber grippy. It's not going to fall out of my hand But it will if it gets used in the field eventually it will look worse than this like all of our tools And I'll leave a link to our tried and tested tools video. That is a thing Where we've gone over how rough we are sometimes on tools because not because we want to be but these are used out In the field a lot and you want things that'll survive, but everything about it feels really tough tight It's like it's a grippy shouldn't fall out of your hand, but you know ladders things It does have Different cables in here a couple RJ 11 for phone couple RJ 45 Two of these two of these and a pair of these the crimpons And now these are handy with the alligator clips because this does have a tone generator built into it So that's actually kind of nice if they have that in there So you can just alligator clip onto that and if you've done like old 66 block work And stuff like that it is handy having those alligator clips. I still run into it occasionally now the device itself comes with One of these so this is the main one that comes with it and inserts Into it snaps in it's actually pretty tight in there So this isn't going to just fall out and get lost on you It is labeled with a number one they do sell accessory kits So you can get like two plot two three four five and do different network tests And it also covers RJ 45 RJ 11 And Testing I guess this would be the coax tester. Yeah coax testing. Anyways, we never do coax testing So it's not going to be covered today if you're into coax testing it does have that on there We just never see it anymore. It's kind of kind of gone. So turn the device on and Actually, I'm going to start with this tiny little cable here So grab this cable We'll grab the little end One two three four five six seven eight. We know this cable passed So tiny little cable it recognizes device one and it passed now So this is something that I haven't seen I know there's other cable testers out there that do this But this is novel that they have this included Please note that they included shielded RJ 45s, and if you use a shielded RJ 45 One two three four five six and an S for shield so it identifies the shielding on there, which is definitely really cool So we have that Now it also can do cable length so I'm gonna grab a And I put an end on this for convenience But obviously you can do it with the crimpers and just end on there But let's see how long this cable is. It's actually into a box and it measures 583 I had to spin the box around over here According to the box and the label on this box there is 590 feet of cable on there So I'm not sure who's right Corey who wrote that on the box or this device here But you can take and adjust this there is an option in here If you have a known length of cable and you can adjust it based on that known length to get it fine tuned Speaking of which these are 100 foot bundles as labeled that we had laying around there's some cheap Generic cable that came with something. I don't know what but let's plug them into this real quick And we got ninety nine point five So if this generic unlabeled cable is accurate In and in being a hundred foot in length that thinks it's ninety nine point five feet in length So I'm gonna say the cable length is fairly accurate now this Tool for doing that also helps find breaks and shorts and things like that and the same thing happens It will tell you length to short it has that option as well Let's jump out of that Let's jump into the PoE testing part of that. That's actually what's gonna be much more interesting We're gonna plug into here. I have this heavy gauge cat six shielded high quality Cable properly crimped we'll get in poop or eight Right there. All right, and we're gonna watch it work. It's magic 54 volts 29.9 watts the check mark means based on the class which is class four It is providing the proper voltage. So go ahead and hold the button in for the network for a few seconds Let's for a beep now. We're going to load test that it's gonna walk through the wattage like it said in a manual 54 volt still 30.1 watts at 52 volts So now we know it's not only claiming to do it It's actually giving us the 52 at 30 point one So once again, it's passing and it loaded up to the proper voltage, but things can cause problems So I'm gonna go back to this cable that I have here That is really long 500 something. Let's measure that again. I think it was 580 something feet, which is further than you're supposed to run PoE, so we'll plug this in real quick 584 we're gonna plug in this cable to the PoE and grab the other end of it. So that's plugged in there Alright, so I have my mono price Cable this is that when we just tested that's like 580 odd feet of cable more than you're supposed to be running these four But let's see how it works and let's PoE load test after going through all this cable In case you don't know what no pole means it kind of means the box fell and kind of got tangled inside So let's do a test 53 volts so we lost a volt going 500 feet and we lost a little wattage So now it's 43. He's going through the test right now 28.4 watts 43 volts All right, so now that it's under load we know what's happening So we are only able to get a maximum of 43 volts at the end of this cable and 28 watts and now this is why testing under load is important. Now. This is the max load. This is not what the unify Device sound plug into the end here and test works with I'll grab this right here. This is just your standard Unify access point is a unified HD and we can see it working now One of the things I want to point out when you're using it just a standard HD this thing Doesn't go much over. I think it's like 10 12 watts So this cable despite being too long despite being Exceeding some of the length we talked about this in the video that me and Dan did that some cables can go a little over length But you'll see that it works. It's hard to see in this lighting, but you can see it's lighting up. Yep It's lighting up and adopted Worked fine even with that But this is that important part because someone asked if this does inline testing it does not but it does full load testing So if this passes at a full load at a certain cable length It's it certainly passed with a device that doesn't require as much load in theory But this is another you know tool to keep in there for some of the troubleshooting Now the next question that's gonna come up is what about these little guys and that's actually why I have these out So we're gonna go and shuffle around and plug these in because what is the voltage loss of putting this in there? All right, now we're gonna test these tiny little 32 gauge cables that are not Actually certified 28 gauges as high as you want to go refer back to long discussion me and Dan had about cabling standards I'll link that video below as I said, and here's a standard Duty cat 5e cable, so we're gonna test that one first Let's see what kind of wattage and voltage we get out of this 54 volts as expected 29.9 watts 51 volts alright, so there's slight variation within tolerance got the little check mark definitely passed What happens gonna drop that and we're gonna switch to the 32 gauge cable Granted we're only dealing with 30 watts here, so it's not dangerous. This can handle 30 watts 54 30 watts 51 volts 30 watts Oddly just ever so slightly better at 29 to 30. So this is actually kind of confusing Now the point I'm kind of making is one this cable can handle it Also, we're probably talking more about using these cables as patch cables than something this long But even this long what's happening is and I wanted to bring this up This is not thin enough to really cause at the wattage. We're talking about any major issues apparently I'm not an electrical engineer by trade But just letting you know that these cables do seem to work as a PoE patch This has no problem putting them under load and they didn't melt in my hand at 30 watts They don't even feel warm in any measure But when you're talking about the last few inches of the cable in here You're only having a loss or any loss at all on this last small piece of cable Obviously we ran these cables at length and we had a really really long one. Well, you get some different results because over time It's going to or over distance. I should say in that time, but over distance You're going to have more of a problem versus one inch right here. It's like I said getting The full 29.951 volts no problems there seems to be some of the variants each time I test it So you would probably run in the wall or wherever it's running a really long Let's say this is a hundred foot cable as measured and we plug this in here And it will plug Well, why not patch it twice? So we're coming out at thin wire going into standard some cheap wire But it works. It will provide the voltage and then going out of here We get 53 volts 29.6 watts 43 volts because of the distance 29.6 watts, but if we change this out We put this cable back in the heavier gauge cable to the heavier gauge cable to the heavier gauge cable all the way across Let's see what it does when it runs a test now 53 is doing the test 28.743 So this last little distance the patching distance and obviously there's to the wall patch as well Doesn't make a massive difference. So using these thin cables does not seem to be problematic I wish I had a 90 watt device to test these on to you know, see whether limits are but I imagine once you get up to The higher wattage, okay, maybe that's a consideration But for running something that's lower wattage like an access point It doesn't really seem to be much of a problem But it's not that much, you know savings to see even go these are 32 gauge to go with like I had mentioned the 28 gauge Which are also much thinner than this and you look really nice and have better ratings for cannelling power If you're future thinking going well, yeah, we got 30 watts today But you know, we plan to step it up with a higher end PTZ camera that's gonna need full 90 watts for all the night vision everything on there Now last thing I'll cover with this it does have like I said a tone generator in it It does have a couple options for finding split pairs. It also has options for Doing the tone on different Pins which I thought was kind of novel that it could do that Let me walk you through it real quick Well, the other things and like it says it's all in the manual You can specifically test things on different pins like this versus all the pins You can do what they call split testing that turns on split testing turns on and off So it has that go back over and put this on put on all of them and then for tone generating This is something else. I thought was just kind of neat the fact that the tone generator will Put a toner and listener in there here We got a couple different options on it And then you walk through This is on all pins And this is only on certain pins And I'm not moving a tone generator Or not moving a tone probe By moving it to different pins I thought that was just kind of a neat feature being able to pick which pins the tones come out on and to turn off tone mode Just hold the button and it does a series of long presses We've just definitely had a lot of fun testing it. I will show as a final test It will do a poe device that's not active like this So we have just a passive brick and we're gonna plug it in there and Show what it does with a passive brick And it understands the voltage on here It understands the wattage on here But that's it. It's not going to tell you Much else about it because it can't because these are not active. So it's not identifying Different options, but it does at least tell you what the brick is working So if you have situations, we're using a poe brick That is definitely something it can still test Overall, I do like this tester The it works really well. We do have a couple of these thin cables And let's do one more thin cable test while I'm talking here, but it works great I have had no problems with all the playing we've been doing with it for the last few days Putting it to the test. We've you know taken it. We took it on one job site And tested each of the cables. It will work with these. These are 20 foot thin cables and we're going to poe this one in Show you what happens, but No problem working with these two and we're going to do the poe load test on the thin cable And once again Same result, but it works. It works with all these. Like I said, it's kind of fun to play with this And understand that same wattage is coming out. Oh someone asked me if these will carry wattage I guess I have one here so I could show you real quick Yes, these thin ones have these other flat ones not thin. These are the flat cables. I guess they're thin too but Same results Comes up test 53 there Same wattage coming out of them. So yes, you can take flat cables and run 30 watts to roam as well I do like these flat cables. So they're pretty they're pretty cool. And this is 30 foot or 20 this is an odd length cable I don't I think it's actually might be a 25 footer, but it measures at 27 I haven't measured it to see how accurate that is But I'm pretty amazed that it can measure a flat cable because it doesn't have the same twists in it Obviously, they they cross over each other in a different way because they're laid out flat. So anyways, um, they This is a new device. I have not seen it. You can buy it directly from ideal I've not seen it on like amazon or any other places, but I imagine a few suppliers The big suppliers have it. So I don't have any special offer or link from it This unit was sent to us for review. Uh, and he said we can keep it Which is exciting why it's going to go in there. So I'm excited about that That I get to keep it. That's I don't always get to keep everything we review sometimes stuff has to get sent back but this one's definitely added to our toolkit and When we want to test poe, so I'll probably be buying more of these in the future But great device if you share your thoughts and comments below and like I said, you can get this right from ideal I have no offer codes or affiliates for where to get this thing. 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