RE: CBus introductory course

["Keith Doxey" <ukha@xxxxxxx>]

CAT5 Cable is balanced.

As long as Clipsal are using the cable correctly and ensuring that what
goes
down one wire of a pair returns along the other wire of the pair, there
should be no problems whatsoever.

Even if the cable was chucking out all sorts of noise, an adjacent CAT5
cable carrying Ethernet or KAT5 would pick up the interference equally on
each wire of the pair. The difference between the two interference signals
picked up would be ZERO therefore NO INTERFERENCE.

That is the whole point of balanced transmission over CAT5.

As C-Bus can be run using multiple cables, I personally would choose to run
to several locations rather than just one or two cables carrying the whole
lot. The primary reason for doing so is resilience. If everything is on one
cable and it get damaged you loose everything. If you have 4 cables with an
even split of kit on them you will only loose 25% of your system.

At work, if you lift the floor tiles, there are cable trays carrying
hundreds of CAT5 cables for long distances. There are other cable trays
close to these carrying power cables for all the floor boxes. No
interference problems.

As I have said in previous posts, IF you have the luxury of being able to
run cables along separate routes with a nice big separation then do it, but
if not, don't loose sleep over it. The only thing you should ALWAYS ensure
is that there is a PHYSICAL SEPARATION or BARRIER between Mains and Low
Voltage. This is a mandatory requirement for safety.

Keith

www.diyha.co.uk
www.kat5.tv


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Robinson [mailto:ukcueman@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 11 June 2003 21:02
>
> I was also wondering about the problems with mixing cbus cables with
> LAN/phone/Kat5 etc. Niall is strongly opposed to this - not
> for what it will
> do to cbus, but for what the cbus currents might do to data cables.
>
> Have you run cbus cat5 next to data cat5?
>
> Paul