 So the question comes up a lot about what cable to buy. What should I get? But I want to address this little piece of it first because we've run into this a lot. Plenum cable. Now, plenum cable is cable that is constructed out of a slightly different fire retardant plastic jacket for low smoke polyvinyl PVC as a fluorinated ethylene polymer. I'll leave the link here so you can read these because I'm not good at all these big words. But it's basically a fire retardant cable that you have to use in case you're using this inside of an area that is a shared air circulation area, a plenum. So what defines that? So the plenum space, and we're gonna take a picture here for how a plenum space looks. So here's a drop ceiling. This is your living, working area. This is actually how our office laid out. We have a four-stair return and a four-stair supply connected to our HVAC system. There's the dead, non-circulating air space above the drop ceiling where we have cables properly loomed, hung from hangers, and run inside our ceiling. This is not part of the circulated air. All the buildings I've been in in Michigan have always been set up this way. I don't know if it's because of our climate or whatnot, but I've been told by many people, most of them seem to be from down south, that this is a common setup where they just use the negative air space of the ceiling and instead of running duct work to here, they use this as the air pull. Well, in that case now you're running cables technically inside of an air space where the HVAC system's pulling everything from. So they want you to use a fire-rated plenum cable because this would reduce toxic smoke in case of a fire. So here's your four-stair in, but your air pull here. I have not seen these in Michigan. And one of the other comments I had in my previous video when someone said, well, it's not a municipal thing. Well, actually for us it has been. We have some cities that the requirement that the inspector, because they have inspections on this, it's a city thing, they require plenum, they don't care if it's going in a wall or not. They just have a rule. So that being said, plenum, if you're sharing an air space, may be a requirement based on some municipalities and it is a recommended if you're a National Fire Protection Association, have specific rules, not leave a link to this Wikipedia article. Now let's talk about other cables and specifically we'll start with what to avoid. Cat's 6,000 foot UTP solid cable. Wow, this is great. Cat's 6,000 feet for 56 bucks. What's the hang up here? Well, it's pretty simple. This is copper clad aluminum. They take aluminum and coat it in copper. So they can create a cheaper cable. This is not necessarily a good thing. You don't get the best of both worlds here like they may try to claim. One of the problems is this will not conduct PoE quite as efficiently. Matter of fact, I don't know exactly how many watts it takes but I will tell you copper can hold a lot more. I thought about trying to find a small box of this and doing some tests. I know a couple of people have done this on YouTube but we're gonna put different wattages over them. We were discussing this. If we ever find or come across this that we're cutting out of a place because we've unfortunately run into vendors that were really cheap and have installed these at places and it's just not good cable. It breaks easier, is not as malleable because aluminum is not as malleable. Aluminum's great, not for this though. So it's not like I'm talking on aluminum here. It's just, this is the facts of how physics work and how metallurgy works. Copper is a better conductor and a better piece of metal to make cabling from. And the price difference isn't that substantial. I mean, if you just find one box you're like, well, it's 56 bucks here and 134. It's more than double the price for full solid copper cables. Well, it's really when you're looking at a job if you're doing a house, a thousand foot would probably cover an entire house depending on how many jacks you have and how many line drops you need put in. But generally speaking, it works well. Just go ahead and spend the extra money. It's a one-time cost. Most of the expenses in labor and when we've had to break the bad news to clients that yeah, a lot of problems are because they use the wrong type of cable. The labor exceeds what that cable savings was. Most of the, if you look at my bidding job you'll see most of it is the labor that goes into putting the cabling in, not the cable. I mean, the cable has a cost to it but it's not the substantial overall job price. It adds up, of course, when you start saying, hey, we had a place that needed 70 bucks as the cable. So that becomes a larger cost factor for people but we still never go all the way down to that we'll use to standard cat six riser which works perfectly fine. Cat 5E is still cheaper. You can still get a box for 85 bucks. And Cat 5E supports gigabit, perfectly fine and they have the new 802.3, 2.5 G base dash T that they're, I don't know, I haven't really looked much into the cards that are coming out there but it's two and a half gigs over 100 meters of Cat 5E. So we're seeing some repurpose to that but it kind of comes down to, if you're doing it new, sure Cat 5E is probably not the one to go with. Cat six is gonna be a little bit faster and of course with that same standard we're gonna get five gigabit out of 100 meters of Cat six but it's still out there, it's a cheap box and if you've already have a place wired for that and you just wanna add a couple drops that's part of the reason we still see a lot of the Cat 5E out there because well you're gonna be punching it down to a Cat 5E patch panel that they already have so you're adding a couple more. So you still see a lot of this out there and for most people gigabit is still fine. That is still the adapters that ship with most computers is still gonna be gigabit. Until you get into the really high end workstations are not shipping many of them with RJ45 10 gigabit jacks on them and I haven't seen any of them of this in between standard of the 2.5 and 5 gigabit one, nothing really that available. So the last thing to talk about is Cat 6A. Now, if you're building brand new and you wanna go all out and make sure you future-proof your office, business, house and you go you know I just wanna go full out this. Now Cat 6A does support the full 10 gigabit range over RJ45, this cable though and me and Corey talked about this. It is a lot stiffer, a lot harder to work with so there's a lot more labor involved in installing it but if you have the budget and it's not, especially if you're wearing a house you probably only need one spool to get this going spend a little bit more especially if you're building something new run this and be future-proof, not bad idea. Everything about it is a little bit more expensive as well. We talked about the Cat 6A shielded patch panel. Maybe I'll do a specific demonstration on this but if you go all the way and get the shielded one you can even go higher to shielded cables a particular one I just had a link here for. This is Cat 6A Unshielded and we find you the Cat 6A shielded which goes up a little bit more, here we go. That's the shielded one and there's one we actually wanted to see. This has an extra jacket in there. This will prevent interference from other RF sources and things like that. So you can go with this and go full shielded on there. It works really well and if you really want to future-proof once again you're only talking another $50 and one box will do it. If you're doing home construction this is far from your expensive cost and it's nice because it does do all the way up to 750 ETL listed over really nice stuff. If we're installing this for a client it's once you want to get into really high end and you need 10 gigabit and you don't want anything to interfere with it this is good cable to use. But those are some of the thoughts and considerations of the cables. I'll leave some of the links in here but like I said stay away from that copper-clad aluminum stuff. 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