About 15 years ago, when my parents bought their house, they had all the phones re-wired. When the guy left he forgot his giant spool o’ wire. I’m guessing there’s about 500 feet of wire left on it. It’s been in my Dad’s basement ever since. A few days ago, due to some phone and DSL problems at work (where we both work) I had to run a new wire. Before I ran it I was talking to someone from AT&T (he diagnosed the problem), he suggested I run Cat5 cable for the new line. when I showed him the spool he said “Oh, Cat3, that’ll be fine, just use that.” Perfect. Saves me the time and money of having to run out and buy more cable. I ran the wire, but when I pulled back the insulation, I noticed it wasn’t twisted pair. I hooked it up, everything is working fine. My question is, if it isn’t twisted pair, should I keep it or toss it? We have a sort of hybrid phone system. That is, he have a phone network in the building, but we also have several jacks that bypass the phone system (fax machine, credit card machine, DSL modem, one POTS phone for when the power goes out). So far, the fax machine is handling the non-twisted pair line just fine, but I’d prefer to buy the proper wire in the future if this is likely to cause problems.
Also, while I was doing that I also had to run a network cable. I picked up some Cat6 wire for that. It was a PITA to terminate. It had a hard plastic piece running down the core that wouldn’t fit in to the RJ11 jacks very nicely.
Cat3 is twisted, it just is not twisted anywhere near as tightly as Cat5. But it is optimum for telephone lines, being larger gauge conductors than Cat5.
Never throw away wire, tools, metal, wood, plastic or any other useful materials. If you don’t want it, I’d take it off your hands, but my basement is full.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the TelCo guy said Cat3, but I thought the wire said Cat1 on it. Maybe it is twisted. My dad told me it was twisted. Well, he told me when they installed it they told him it was twisted. Considering he knows jack about phone wiring, he couldn’t have made that up.
By throw it out, I meant not use it again. It’s not an argument I would have with him. Besides, I’d never throw out copper wiring. I have a guy that comes into our store that’s a scrapper. He’d be drooling over that much copper. I also have an electrician friend that bought a Cadillac with scrap wire. When he first started out as an electrician he’d grab all the pieces of scrap wire (with the owner’s permission) and him and his roommate would sit in their apartment stripping it and selling the copper. I know he still does this, so I’d offer it to him first.
Yeah CAT3 is basically good enough for phone lines and 10Mbps (and low speed serial if you are still using green screen terminals).
I’d probably just sell it on Craigs List.
When you can buy a 300m spool of CAT5e for under $100 CAT3 isn’t very appealing.
MtM