Cable Rejuvenation

I have no experience, sorry.

Anyone here have experience please share..

"Underground cable rejuvenation goes by several names, including chemical restoration, dielectric enhancement, cable treatment, and silicone injection."These guys seem to be experts in this field, I would contact them for more info...

http://www.novinium.com/

Assuming you are talking about medium or high voltage cable. Our local utility did this on thousands of miles of cable, it was an utter failure and a complete waste of money.

it was an utter failure and a complete waste of money.

???, one assumes they did this again and again, encountering the same failure...

Did management own the restoration company??

"???, one assumes they did this again and again, encountering the same failure..."

Well, they did a program stretched out over a decade or so to avoid having to dig up and replace a lot of direct buried MV distribution cables. They hired a company that "guaranteed" success. They came out and did the high pressure injection of a silicone based chemical called Silane into the cables to "rejuvenate" the dielectric strength of the insulation after 30+ years of service. The problem was, they didn't realize it was a failure until 5 years or so later when the cables continued to fail. What they found was that the injection traveled only about 10 feet away fro the injection point (terminations at underground transformers). Turns out the "guarantee" was not worth the paper it was written on because the purveyors had declared bankruptcy right after the job was finished and the owners disappeared with millions of dollars. I learned all of this because one of those cables failed and exploded under the sidewalk in front of my house a few years ago and I got to watch them dig up the entire street to replace the cables. As an EE, I was discussing it with the supervisor, he explained the entire scandal to me.

"Did management own the restoration company??"

That has been speculated on to be sure.

Sounds very much like it was a rather ambitious scam.

Direct injection of silicon (or any thick fluid) into a multicore cable immediately rang warning bells in my head, as it should have the company engineers (unless of course management didn't' bother talking to them, which wouldn't surprise me).

I have not come across a case like this. Success depends on the condition of cable and the process of rejuvenation. Better option is replacing with new cable.

I guess it would depend on the type of cable and how well it has been looked after over the last 20 years (both physically and electrically).

If it were me I would investigate "cable rejuvenation" but ultimately still replace the cable.

I have had some minor experience in this area and I would not even consider it on cable that is 20 yrs old. What kind of cable is it? In conduit or DB?

order new cables, and resell old cables to vendor.

Cable????

Like this or what?

Hi visaseller

You don't tell us what type of cable this is; HV/MV/LV or Oil, PVC, PILC, XLPE.

If it is a MV PILC cable; what have you done to it to require replacement after 20 tears, this type of cable should happily see 75 years.

XLPE is relatively new on the scene but there are cables which have already been in service for well over30 years.

If you are going to wreck a cable every 20 years then rather replace it with an overhead line.

Regards

will you explain the type, size and voltage of the cable and it is also important to know

about, location,and condition of laying and length.

I seriously doubt that cable rejuvenation is usually the best way to spend money on a cabling improvement. Now if the rejuvenation can be done in situ and cable removal will create a larger problem then this maybe worth the effort. I suspect that you'll find that the vast majority of cable replacement jobs, the labor and/or downtime costs will greatly exceed the cost of new cables. So removing the old cables to rejuvenate them and put them back in place will leave your business with nearly the identical bill of replacing these cables with new cables. I suspect that any apparent cost advantage to cable rejuvenation will vanish if one includes the metal recovery money one will get from recycling the old cables.

Navy ships run miles of cables and they last for years. True, most hang from overhead racks and most are over 20 years old. We did not run new cable unless from a connection box - be it power or communications. Only ran cable separate from power if there was a change of interference but still overhead.