Buying back the newest cable in Central Ohio

Why the surplus here is new

A hospital addition, a school, a data hall, a distribution building: each one starts with a cable order written before the drawings are final. The estimator adds a margin for pull waste. The contractor adds another for the panel changes that always come. The supplier ships full reels because a partial reel costs the same to handle and less to explain. At closeout the leftover sits in a connex or a cage at the back of a warehouse, still wrapped, still tagged with a project number nobody has thought about since.

That is the character of Central Ohio cable. It has not been weathered, it has not been through a demolition, and it usually has an identifiable order behind it. When the tag names the job, the purchase order and the date, a review is quick and the conversation is short.

The families a new-build leaves behind

The bulk is feeder and branch: 12 and 10 AWG THHN in the common colours, 500 and 750 kcmil XHHW-2 for service and distribution, MC with aluminium armour on the runs that had to be fast, and Cat6 in boxes opened for one floor and never finished. Food and beverage work adds washdown-rated cable and stainless armour. Data-centre construction adds a category of its own, ordered with redundancy built in and therefore with spare capacity built in too.

Temporary power sits alongside all of it: SOOW cord, cam-lock leads and portable distribution cable bought for a job that has since become permanent. It is usually the dirtiest material in the cage and the easiest to identify.

• THHN/THWN-2 in full 500 ft coils
• XHHW-2 feeder, 350 to 750 kcmil
• MC and MC-AP from fit-out
• Cat6 boxes, partly pulled
• SOOW and cam-lock temporary power

Docks, intermodal and the I-270 ring

Logistics here is the least awkward in the state. New warehouses have high docks, wide aprons and yards paved for 53-foot trailers, and the parks around I-270 and the Rickenbacker air cargo area were laid out for exactly this movement. Columbus also has Norfolk Southern intermodal, which starts to matter when a lot is large enough to think about rail rather than a van.

The friction is administrative. A distribution tenant may not own the cable in the cage, the electrical contractor may be three jobs gone, and the property manager may be the only person left on site to ask. Establishing who may release the material takes longer than loading it.

Reading a closeout lot

Full coils with intact factory wrap are the simple case. The print is legible, the length is printed on the wrap, and the only question left is whether that colour and size still have a buyer. Opened coils and cut lengths have to be measured. Mixed pallets have to be sorted, and a pallet that mixes aluminium SER with copper THHN is worth less as a unit than as two separate lots.

Data cable is its own conversation. Boxes opened, pulled from and returned are the norm, and the remaining length is rarely known to anybody. Plenum or riser, pair count and whether the box sat in a damp container decide the outcome, so read the print on the cable rather than the label on the carton.