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Why does nobody talk about how Ethernet cables degrade in direct sunlight?
I was replacing a line on a house in Tucson last week and the jacket just crumbled in my hands. The sun baked it for like 3 years straight. Anyone else run into this and just swap to direct burial stuff?
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jake_dixon15d ago
Did that jacket just get brittle and fall apart in your hands? I've seen cables go from fine to dust in a few months down here in Phoenix when they're running along south-facing brick. The UV just eats through the PVC like nothing. But the weird part is did the copper itself look okay under there or was it green and corroded too? I always wonder if the data signals start getting sketchy long before the jacket fails or if it works fine right up until the insulation cracks and moisture gets in.
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anthony42615d ago
Three months is a pretty quick timeline for that kind of failure, even in Phoenix. I've seen cables last a year or two in similar spots before the jacket gets crumbly. @jake_dixon is right that UV is rough on PVC, but I've pulled apart plenty of those old cables where the jacket was shot and the copper underneath was still shiny. In my experience the data signals hold up way longer than you'd think. You start getting drops and errors well before the jacket looks bad, but it's usually from crappy terminations or a bad crimp, not the UV. I'd bet money that cable was still passing packets fine until the day a bird or a squirrel bit through the last bit of good insulation and shorted it out.
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