Conduit

On Friday, I thought of something that seemed incredibly profound.  Or at least the verbage seemed incredibly profound.  It apparently wasn’t, because I don’t remember what the idea was.  As the old saying goes, if it wasn’t important enough to remember, it wasn’t that important. 

I spent Friday in an attic, running wires for an installation on Monday.  All told, it took about four hours to run 2” conduit so we could run 1 wire.  Did we really need to go to that kind of effort?  Absolutely not.  Did we?  Absolutely.  Will it pay off in the end?  A million fold.

See, the big thing in running conduit through the ceiling is not the immediate payoff.  It’s the long run payoff.  Because if we need to run more conduit wires on a later basis, it’s simply a matter of tying the wire or wires onto the pull string left in place, and yanking through the ceiling.  Twenty minutes to get another ten or fifteen wires through the ceiling.  It will take longer to bring the boxes of cable inside the building than it will to get it all run.  That’s the beauty and the entire reason it was done.

We’ve done this at several of our stores.  It was always something we’d talked about, but never done.  Since we’ve been in construction mode for so long, we’ve begun to take those education points from our construction work and applied it to our existing sites.  Running conduit through the ceiling is a pain and a lot of work, but in the end the payoff is huge.  Should we need to expand any site will conduit through the ceiling, it takes one tenth the time.  All because of lessons we learned during construction. 

Because a lesson is not learned if you keep making the same mistake and you don’t learn from it.  I think we’ve learned.  And as a general rule, the way we do things is generally impressive to anyone we run into.  The idea of numerous colors of CAT5 cable seemed revolutionary, and was in comparison to the 18 gray or blue cables run through the building.  Tracing wire becomes a joke when you combine different color wires and boots.  And that’s the goal.  To decrease the time we spend working on projects like that.