I’ve been removing ivy and virginia creeper vines from my property for the past 8 years-- there was a lot of it. When I got near the property line, I pulled up some vines and underneath the leaves was the coax cable line coming from the tap near the curb running to the side of my house. It wasn’t buried at all, it was just hidden by the vines. I no longer use the cable service since I frequently had problems with it and they couldn’t figure out what the problem was; so I switched to fiber which is now buried in conduit.
While I no longer use the service, I may consider switching back at some time in the future so I don’t want to damage the line with the lawnmower or trimmer or have my new neighbors accidentally damage it since it’s near the property line. Is this something that the cable company would resolve even though I’m not currently using their service? I can sort of bury it myself, but there isn’t much slack on the line to bury it more than an inch.
I’m pretty sure the line is already damaged in some way since I frequently had problems with cable service when I did you use it.
I also uncovered a cable line going from my house to my neighbors house. I could never figure out what it was for and disconnected it from the splitter shortly after moving in. It went from the splitter straight into the ground and I never wanted to dig around the utility lines to trace it. It turns out it went underground, then surfaced again at the corner of the fence (hidden in ivy) and into my neighbors yard. This could explain why they never said one word to me for the 7 years they lived next door until their house foreclosed last year.
This is up to your local cable provider … but my sense is that if you sign up for service in the future, they will just run new coax … here where I live that pretty much standard procedure so I’m free to dispose of any extra coax on my property as I wish after the service is stopped …
We had the power, cable and phone lines knocked to the ground a month ago by a falling tree. The power and cable were promptly restored, but our unused phone line, like your unused cable line, took awhile. A phone company rep even asked me if I was sure I wanted it removed. I told him it was draped across my grandkid’s swing set and someone need to do something about it. They just wanted to leave it there.
Funny about your neighbor’s tie-in, but they shouldn’t have had cable anyway. They would have needed to rent the cable box (de-coder) from the cable company. Or hack one.
Way back before cable feeds were encoded (mid 1980s) the line to my house was live. But that plugged into the set, no box needed.
I remember when everyone in the area got letters from the cable company encouraging home owners to sign up for cable. The basic threat in the letters was, “We know who you are, you guys that have sets hooked up.” Hah. They eventually just went down the streets and unhooked every drop from the poles if the house did not have a cable account.
I boycotted the local cable company once, for an entire decade. I got so angry at them that I cut the cable off of my house, coiled it up and nailed it to the wooden pole in the alley it came from. Where it stayed for several years, until somebody came by and cleaned it up. Eventually, DSL got really bad and I got cable again – with significantly better customer service and network stats, this time – and they ran another cable up to my house to install it. The cable company never mentioned the fact that I cut the cord, literally. They happily reinstalled it at no charge.
I’d say whatever is on your property is your problem, though. They’re not going to come and clean it up for you. If you don’t want cable in your yard you need to remove it yourself. Don’t worry about future service, they’ll run a new cable to your house if necessary in that event.
If your house ever signs up for cable, they aren’t going to waste time looking for old cables. Note the important word old-they don’t want the service calls that implies. They will run a new cable to your house. Get rid of the old cable and keep on weeding!
No need to cut it. It’s very likely that the end just plugs in at the tap near the street, inside whatever junction box it is in. You can just unplug that, coil up the cable, and put it in with your recycling.
If you ever start cable service again, they will just run a new coax cable from that street tap to your house.
Two years ago when we moved into the house we are in now, it had been vacant at least a year. When it was time for the cable service to start (high-speed internet only, no phone, no television) the installer checked the drop from the pole (a long ways away) and declared it looked good. Installation consisted of only lopping off about fifteen feet of ethernet cable inside the house (apparently the former owner was unaware or didn’t believe in wifi) and crimping a new TNC on the end of it, about fifteen minutes; worth. Easiest installation ever, he said.
Alright, I guess I won’t worry about it. IIRC correctly I had a lot of problems with cable when it rained, so I’m guessing the line has a nick in it somewhere anyway. I just didn’t want to be charged a ridiculous installation fee if I removed it.
This was a couple years before our cable company went digital, so they would have still gotten basic cable channels without a cable box or digital adapter. Or they could have used a cheater box to get the premium channels. I should probably explain this situation to my new neighbors before they find the other end of the cable and think I ran the coax to their house for nefarious reasons.
Just this week the cable guys were out in our back yard, taking down a temporary cable that had been strung up and down the block along the back fence back in May of last year. Apparently an underground cable had had some sort of problem, so they strung the temporary cable up across the top of the privacy fences that run along the back of everyone’s yards. A guy came to the door one day while I was working from home and explained that they were getting ready to bury a new cable, and then the temporary cable would be taken down, and don’t worry they weren’t going to tear up our yard (which was good news because we had just put new sod down a few months earlier).
Fast forward through summer, fall, and winter, and the cable was still hanging on the fence. Finally this week a guy came to the door while I was working from home again and let me know they’d be working in the back yard to remove the cable. What happened was that sometime over the summer, our local cable company got bought out by some other company, and the service ticket to remove the temporary cable somehow got overlooked by the new company.
I seriously thought about just going out at some point with some wire cutters and cutting it down. I figured it was inactive anyway, and if not then someone would call that their cable had gone out. (We do not use the local cable company, we have AT&T.)
