Yeah the blowing machine is expensive, but the company selling the HDPE
conduit can put a pull tape (up to 5000 lb) into the conduit for extra
money. If I only have to add pull tape to bored sections under
driveways, I can do that easily with a fish tape. Then I'd use a
capstan to pull the whole run through.
For background, I'm looking at a relatively small project: about a
mile. That's why one machine that plows and drills /seems/ attractive
on the surface....and why more cost for a conduit with a pull tape
already in looks better to me than a blowing machine.
On depth I don't really know for sure. Good question. I have a few
different conflicting sources.
On 4/6/2016 11:39 AM, Chris Fabien wrote:
You can definitely plow in conduit. If you're going to do it that way
you would want to look into blowing in the fiber after all the conduit
is placed. This is a nice approach because you can splice/couple
conduit very easily so the switch between plow and drill is not a big
deal. Then once all the conduit is in the ground and coupled together,
you can blow fiber in through the whole run in one shot. The blowing
equipment is fairly expensive but I would think you can rent that.
Do you have a requirement for how deep you need to be placing your
cable? A small plow like that could pull short sections of conduit at
18" or maybe up to 24" deep. If you need to go any deeper you'll need
a much larger plow.
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 11:31 AM, Adam Moffett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
That's good advice, thanks.
I see what you're saying about laying out the whole run at the
first obstruction and what a pain that would be.
I pictured plowing in an HDPE conduit with a pull tape in it
rather than plowing cable directly into the ground. So I'd be
pulling the entire run off a reel trailer either way. At the
moment this project exists mostly in my imagination so if plowing
in conduit is a dumb idea, this would be a perfect time to tell
me. :)
The discussion about whether you should drill or plow a
certain stretch is subjective. Remember that every time you
plow and need to go under an obstacle you have to figure 8 the
whole cable run, or cut and have a splice point there. That
can be a lot of labor if you're trying to keep a long run
intact. Personally, when we are running in a rural area, if we
have driveways every 200-400ft we drill that area. If we can
go 800ft or more without obstructions then we plow that.
Chris
