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Pardon the pun, but there's a dirty little secret in fiber cable cleaning: so-called "dry" fiber cables (those without the sticky pik cable gel) still need to be cleaned. It's an industry misconception that, since they have no pik to be removed, dry fibers require no solvent cleaning. The truth is, they can contaminate splicing machines and OTDRs (optical time-domain reflectometers--aka fiber testing machines) and, thus, do need cleaning. Dry cables have no pik on them, but they do have a coating of absorbent powder, which can wick moisture from the air and become tacky, in turn gunking up splicing and test equipment. Contamination of such equipment leads to poor performance and blame on manufacturers. Equipment manufacturers are, in fact, seeing significant Db loss on relatively new machines, and experiencing early returns for warranty work. Again, SqueekyKleen to the rescue. But while SqueekyKleen prevents this contamination from dry cables, it's logical to assume that there will be resistance by some to clean cables that supposedly don't need cleaning (according to the manufacturers). No problem, you then sell FiberKleen for cleaning the equipment. You can't lose. This is good for the contractor, the cable manufacturer, the equipment manufacturer, the distributor, and for all of us. That's rare. |
