
	Friday Fax A Weekly Summary of Polywater^® News of Incredible Importance

Issue #555

Pull-Planner™ lesson #5 is on Conduit Fill.

Conduit Phil

"Conduit Phil" is a guy some in the industry are familiar with: he's the sleazy huckster across town with the cheapest price on duct ... or used cars, electronics, jewelry, etc. But we're not talking about Phil. In the world of cable pulling the phonetically identical term "Conduit Fill" has an entirely different meaning. It relates to what's inside the duct, not who sells it. Welcome to Pull-Planner tutorial #5. For our purposes, conduit fill is a volumetric measurement of the duct space occupied by the cables inside, expressed as a percent. The National Electrical Code has established fill limits, typically around 40%, depending on cable and duct specifics. The purpose of limits has nothing to do with cable pulling. They're intended as a safety measure, to allow sufficient space within the duct for heat dissipation. Knowing the conduit fill percentage is useful for contractors wanting to comply with the NEC. Power utilities are generally not bound by the NEC fill limits for distribution cable, and often pull with higher percentages. Higher fill percentages can lead to clearance problems (and jamming), so knowing the number is again helpful. Communication cables don't give off heat, so fill limits would seem less important. However, the NEC is extending its reach to include such cables anyway (that's a whole other story). Whatever one's reason for needing to know it, the Pull-Planner Software automatically calculates conduit fill percentage from user input on cable types, size, and quantity. No hand counting required! That's a value not even Phil can match.

The Friday Fax Editor's Joke of the Week

The Joke

The Herd. Bud is with his herd in a pasture when a BMW drives up. A young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, and RayBan sunglasses says out the window, "If I tell you exactly how many cows you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?" Bud eyes the man and says, "Sure." The man whips out his Dell notebook PC, connects it to a Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA webpage. He calls up a GPS satellite for an exact fix on his location, which he feeds to another satellite that scans the area in ultra-high resolution. He opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Germany. In seconds he receives an email on his Palm Pilot confirming the image was processed and stored. He accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and soon receives a response. He prints a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, mini HP LaserJet printer, turns to Bud and says, "You have 1,586 cows." Bud says, "That's right. You get a calf." Amused, he watches the man select an animal and stuff it into his car. Then Bud says, "If I can tell you what your job is, will you return my calf?" The man thinks a second and says, "Okay." "You're a U.S. Congressman", says Bud. "Wow! You're right," he says, "How'd you guess?" "Not a guess," Bud says, "You show up here even though nobody called; you want to get paid for an answer I already know, to a question I never asked. You use millions of dollars worth of equipment to show me how smart you are; yet you know nothing about how working people make a living--or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog."

Click here to View This Issue Online With Images
Click here to View Back Issues by Number or View Back Issues by Topic

American Polywater Corporation -- The world's leading manufacturer of cable pulling lubricants, cable cleaners, and MRO & construction chemicals.
P.O. Box 53 | Stillwater, MN 55082 USA
1-(651) 430-2270 (Voice) | 1-(651) 430-3634 (Fax)
1-(800) 328-9384 (Toll-Free US/Canada Only)