# Industrial work - tray cable



## joe-nwt

Tray and cable have been common in Canada for a long time. Here we use mostly teck cable though. I think the main advantages are speed of installation and flexibility.

Main thing is to plan all your runs ahead of time to reduce the number of cross-overs. Teck cable provides added protection for many applications, particularly when you exit the tray with the cable. Because of the armour, support is needed but not necessarily further protection.

Who knows? You may become a fan when the job is complete.:vs_cool:


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## 99cents

There are electricians in Canada who think an apprenticeship is four years of hanging tray and pulling cable.


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## splatz

I don't see that much tray cable in new construction but it seems like most of the new industrial construction is warehouses / distribution centers, not much manufacturing. Trays make a lot of sense to me with manufacturing because they need the flexibility. 

It might make sense in the distribution centers in the packing areas where there's a little more stuff, especially the places with 28' ceilings and safety rules that require production be shut down where you run a scissors lift.


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## JoeSparky

How long are you going to burn both ends of the candle Peter? I ran out of enough hours in the day to do that years ago. At this point, I don't see myself ever being an employee again.


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## paulengr

Tray started in Europe. There are a FEW plants that don’t do it. But with conduit you have to support it every 10 feet.!with tray you can make supports much farther apart but here in the South 12 foot is popular. No threading, not much fitting, no pull boxes. Lots of advantages. And if you pull exposed run rated, no conduit stubs either and terminations are CGBs. It’s faster and less labor to install which means unless it is spaced as conduit, tray wins. Then have you ever tried to replace wiring or modify it in conduit down the road? Milwaukee invented the Sawzall just for that. With tray modifications are easy and cheap.

After 25 years of industrial experience what I’ve seen is everything has gone from rigid to IMC to some thin wall and tray and now almost exclusively tray. Not even duct banks.


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## joebanana

Very common. In 2005 I was on the Mountain View Power Plant project which was 4 combined cycle Co-gen units with 2 steamers, and cable tray was extensive. 3 tiers of 24" tray throughout most of the plant.


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## Navyguy

99cents said:


> There are electricians in Canada who think an apprenticeship is four years of hanging tray and pulling cable.


For my cohort in School it was the building of the Skydome (now referred to as the Rogers Centre).

I had guys in my cohort that drilled core slab for four years, hung conduit for four years, pulled wire for four years, etc. Nobody knew how to do the other's work and they could not figure out a 3-way to save their soul!

Not my cup of tea as it were, but I guess it would good money at the time.

Cheers
John


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## 99cents

MTW, our other bickering aside, you seem like a pretty good tradesman. Hanging tray and pulling cable is more or less gorilla work. You want to prove yourself as the guy who can do terminations and commissioning work. It’s easier on the back and you will still be working after the gorillas have been told to pack up their tools.


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## Southeast Power

MTW said:


> I'm am on my first new construction industrial job. The job is so big that there are three separate electrical contracts with three electrical contractors. We have one of them.
> 
> Anyway, our contract is installing thousands of feet of cable tray and many miles of tray cable for power, instrumentation and control. The other electrical contractor is also installing cable tray and tray cable for all the chiller equipment and feeders to the power and light panelboards. The other day they pulled in 600 kcmil/ 4C tray cable for a motor starter lineup.
> 
> The only pipe and wire on the job is for branch circuits for lights and receptacles. The existing facility is wired the same way - all cable tray especially outside where they have lots of motors and instrumentation. Is this typical for industrial work now?


Just make sure to be a prick about keeping the cables looking nice. The turns seem to get stacked if you don’t. Tie them down as soon as you can too.


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## Switched

Did a job about 10 years ago before going into business for myself. It was a power plant with tons of tray cable. Almost everything except lights and receptacles was tray and cable. 

The company had some older Industrial guys that were used to just installing rigid for everything (Watching them calculate out their bends for 4" was fun). Most had never done tray cable before though.

When it came time to strip the wiring they were having issues. Told the project manager to find out who had done residential work, and knew how to strip out NM cable. 

LOL... Four guys had resi experience and that is all they were doing for a few weeks, just stripping and landing cables in panels and boxes. No makeup or landing to lugs, just stripping.


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## Lone Crapshooter

I am working on a mine tipple and it is all rigid or plastabond. The contractor was telling me that very seldom do they see tray in the coal mining. 
I am doing the detection for the FM200 extinguishing system in motor control rooms and our system is in thin wall.
LC


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## MTW

Thanks for the replies. 

Installing tray is absolute bull work, especially when it's 20-40 feet in the air and multiple elevation changes as it's been on this whole job. I don't enjoy it much, but the wiring part is what we're looking forward to. We have a stack of 4 - 6" trays going well over 1000 feet from one end of the building to the other and wrapping around one section. 

The machine itself is around 600 feet long and is very complicated, hence all the tray. But the machine vendor is from Europe and due to the all the travel restrictions, they have not been able to start so the project is very behind schedule now. 

As for the terminations, I'm looking forward to that part since I already have extensive machine wiring and installation experience, but I may miss that part entirely since I'm getting hand surgery again. If I do make it back, it will be months of terminating. There are several dozen control cabinets scattered around and a control house that is 100 feet long by 25 feet deep. 

Overall, it's a pretty complex and once in a lifetime job.


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## paulengr

Installing tray is no different than conduit. Easier actually if you have the right tools and parts. One guy can carry a 24” x 20 foot aluminum tray with 6” rails although two is better. Just set up your mounts with strut. Then loosely set your tray in place and splice the sections together. Then work from the middle or one end to the other adjusting and bolting as you go. There is a learning curve but you get it pretty quickly. It’s sort of a puzzle to figure out how to get it to behave. Don’t try to bolt everything prematurely.

As far as pulling get rollers for the corners, reel dollies, a tugger, and cable lube. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you don’t need this stuff because tray pulls easier than conduit. Well designed pulls are much faster than jack leg attempts to wrestle it by hand. Heck you are doing thousands of feet so you should just buy and not even bother renting. On short runs even rollers, lube, and a cheap Pullzall makes a huge difference. If you are trying to wrestle cable like Crocodile Dundee you’re doing it wrong.


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## glen1971

IMO, a couple of tips to help keep it looking good, is to solidly bolt down the top, middle and bottom of your waterfalls (vertical transitions). That way when the tray grows, it won't move them and make them look at an angle. 
Make sure your expansion joints are properly supported. 
Putting each of the tray joints exactly on the supports is not the strongest, they should be 1/4 of the span. 
Plan your cables as best you can to avoid crosses. Remember with your plan that certain cable drops, either off the top, or out of the bottom may impact the order they go in the tray. Pick one side of the tray and keep the longest ones along it, then drop off the next longest, followed by the next, etc. Cables will look better tyrapped in a triangle (ex a group of 2 on the bottom and one on the top).
Watch where mechanical protection may be missed on drawings. The one that bites most places is running parallel with the eave of a roof, or just under it and they forget about ice build up.


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## glen1971

paulengr said:


> Installing tray is no different than conduit. Easier actually if you have the right tools and parts. One guy can carry a 24” x 20 foot aluminum tray with 6” rails although two is better. Just set up your mounts with strut. Then loosely set your tray in place and splice the sections together. Then work from the middle or one end to the other adjusting and bolting as you go. There is a learning curve but you get it pretty quickly. It’s sort of a puzzle to figure out how to get it to behave. Don’t try to bolt everything prematurely.
> 
> As far as pulling get rollers for the corners, reel dollies, a tugger, and cable lube. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you don’t need this stuff because tray pulls easier than conduit. Well designed pulls are much faster than jack leg attempts to wrestle it by hand. Heck you are doing thousands of feet so you should just buy and not even bother renting. On short runs even rollers, lube, and a cheap Pullzall makes a huge difference. If you are trying to wrestle cable like Crocodile Dundee you’re doing it wrong.


We've always bolted the tray together and down to the supports as we work down the rack, that way there is no going back. Pry bars with a decent pin on the end make moving it into alignment easy. 
Lots of times we've used a pop bottle on the head of larger cables to keep the cable from binding on the rungs as the rope pulls it. In my experience, ropes can be tricky as they tend to get twisted with the cables as they get pulled. We've never used cable lube on cables in a tray, as that would create a mess. Never had a problem with it. Lots of runs are tough to use a tugger on, by tray design and layout. Most times it's easier to hand bomb in the smaller cables, one at a time.


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## MTW

paulengr said:


> Installing tray is no different than conduit. Easier actually if you have the right tools and parts. One guy can carry a 24” x 20 foot aluminum tray with 6” rails although two is better. Just set up your mounts with strut. Then loosely set your tray in place and splice the sections together. Then work from the middle or one end to the other adjusting and bolting as you go. There is a learning curve but you get it pretty quickly. It’s sort of a puzzle to figure out how to get it to behave. Don’t try to bolt everything prematurely.
> 
> As far as pulling get rollers for the corners, reel dollies, a tugger, and cable lube. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you don’t need this stuff because tray pulls easier than conduit. Well designed pulls are much faster than jack leg attempts to wrestle it by hand. Heck you are doing thousands of feet so you should just buy and not even bother renting. On short runs even rollers, lube, and a cheap Pullzall makes a huge difference. If you are trying to wrestle cable like Crocodile Dundee you’re doing it wrong.


I've never installed tray before this job but the foreman and most of my coworkers have been doing it for years. I've learned it quickly and it's nothing difficult, just tedious. We have a good system going. 

As for the design, that is another story. It's sub optimal for pulling, but none of us have any say in that. Designers and their "models"...


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## canbug

I've enjoyed installing tray when I did but for short periods of time. I always figure it's good to do something new and gain that experience. You don't know whats around the next corner and that having experience on many different jobs just make you better suited for the future and a better electrician.

Tim.


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## MTW

I will say this - my machine wiring days (hence MTW ) are the ace card up my sleeve that will put me to the front of the line. That experience will make that part of the job a breeze, but pulling all the tray cable is going to be the worst part by far.


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## wcord

Lone Crapshooter said:


> I am working on a mine tipple and it is all rigid or plastabond. The contractor was telling me that very seldom do they see tray in the coal mining.
> I am doing the detection for the FM200 extinguishing system in motor control rooms and our system is in thin wall.
> LC


One of the reasons for not have tray and cable, aluminum is not allowed it areas where there is coal dust.
Therefore steel teck and steel tray, of which finding the steel teck would probably be the hard part


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## flyboy

MTW said:


> I will say this - my machine wiring days (hence MTW ) are the ace card up my sleeve that will put me to the front of the line. That experience will make that part of the job a breeze, but pulling all the tray cable is going to be the worst part by far.


If you think of it, take some pictures and post them.


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## MTW

flyboy said:


> If you think of it, take some pictures and post them.


I will tomorrow.


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## joebanana

MTW said:


> I will say this - my machine wiring days (hence MTW ) are the ace card up my sleeve that will put me to the front of the line. That experience will make that part of the job a breeze, but pulling all the tray cable is going to be the worst part by far.


I always wondered if MTW had anything to do with machine tool wire, I guess I know now. BTW the "trick" to pulling tray cable is lots of bodies and loops. I've seen disasters using clamp-on corner rollers.


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## MTW

A few for now, I'll try to get more tomorrow.


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## zac

Let's make sure there's not more then 360 degrees in that run.

Sent from my SM-G970U using Tapatalk


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## paulengr

wcord said:


> One of the reasons for not have tray and cable, aluminum is not allowed it areas where there is coal dust.
> Therefore steel teck and steel tray, of which finding the steel teck would probably be the hard part



That’s for Canadians. No issues with aluminum in the States and we don’t use Teck very often. Most electricians have never seen it. There is a lot more MC and liquidtight with the metal and rigid or IMC though.


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## MTW

zac said:


> Let's make sure there's not more then 360 degrees in that run.


Too late.


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## glen1971

MTW said:


> A few for now, I'll try to get more tomorrow.


Looks good! Are those custom hangers, or unistrut brackets?


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## MTW

glen1971 said:


> Looks good! Are those custom hangers, or unistrut brackets?


All custom fabricated steel work welded to the columns. We drilled and clamped the tray to it.


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## zac

MTW said:


> All custom fabricated steel work welded to the columns. We drilled and clamped the tray to it.


That tray has dog legs all over! 
Next time use an offset connector why don't cha.

Sent from my SM-G970U using Tapatalk


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## MTW

zac said:


> That tray has dog legs all over!
> Next time use an offset connector why don't cha.



Those dog legs are intentional, they are offset connectors for tray.


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## joe-nwt

MTW said:


> Those dog legs are intentional, they are offset connectors for tray.


That's always the fun part of tray work. Any idiot can put up a 20' straight piece and bolt it to the next. The craftsmanship comes out in the custom fitting required on almost every job.:vs_cool:


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## flyboy

joe-nwt said:


> That's always the fun part of tray work. Any idiot can put up a 20' straight piece and bolt it to the next. The craftsmanship comes out in the custom fitting required on almost every job.:vs_cool:


I see


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## MTW

joe-nwt said:


> That's always the fun part of tray work. Any idiot can put up a 20' straight piece and bolt it to the next. The craftsmanship comes out in the custom fitting required on almost every job.:vs_cool:


Yes, figuring out the offsets was definitely a challenge. There was a learning curve for everything there.


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## MTW

flyboy said:


> I see


No, you don't.


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## joe-nwt

MTW said:


> Yes, figuring out the offsets was definitely a challenge. There was a learning curve for everything there.


There always is. Horizontal offset where factory 90°s won't help is another challenge. And there are many more "custom" fits that are fun.

Sounds like you might be warming up to tray work?:smile:


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## MTW

joe-nwt said:


> There always is. Horizontal offset where factory 90°s won't help is another challenge. And there are many more "custom" fits that are fun.
> 
> Sounds like you might be warming up to tray work?:smile:


It's not bad now, the first few weeks I was basically drilling all the holes in the steel and lifting tray into place. Got to do some custom fitting here and there. Lots of threaded rod and strut too. Wire pulling is coming soon.


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## MHElectric

Looks good Petah!

It's always enjoyable to have the opportunity to do something new. Congratulations on this gig. I think everyone should give stuff out of their comfort zone a shot, at least a few times during their career. You never know when you'll try something different that you like. :smile:


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## MTW

MHElectric said:


> Looks good Petah!
> 
> It's always enjoyable to have the opportunity to do something new. Congratulations on this gig. I think everyone should give stuff out of their comfort zone a shot, at least a few times during their career. You never know when you'll try something different that you like. :smile:


It's good while it's lasted and been a great learning experience but it's getting cut short by hand surgery again in a few more weeks. It's unlikely I'll be able to go back there after I've recovered since it's all wire pulling and that's verboten after surgery.


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## MHElectric

canbug said:


> I've enjoyed installing tray when I did but for short periods of time. I always figure it's good to do something new and gain that experience. You don't know whats around the next corner and that having experience on many different jobs just make you better suited for the future and a better electrician.
> 
> Tim.


My opinion, is that the more hands on experience and exposure to different parts of the trade, the better off you'll be. 

I think it helps you "Think outside the box" more.


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## MHElectric

MTW said:


> It's good while it's lasted and been a great learning experience but it's getting cut short by hand surgery again in a few more weeks. It's unlikely I'll be able to go back there after I've recovered since it's all wire pulling and that's verboten after surgery.


Oh well. Good thing you had an opportunity and took it. 

Good luck with your surgery. Hopefully it's a quick recovery.


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## flyboy

MTW said:


> No, you don't.


:yes:



MTW said:


> It's good while it's lasted and been a great learning experience but it's getting cut short by hand surgery again in a few more weeks. It's unlikely I'll be able to go back there after I've recovered since it's all wire pulling and that's verboten after surgery.


Good luck with the surgery.


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## MTW

Just as a quick aside, this new section of the building has a 12,000 amp service fed directly with 4160 from their own cogen plant to a main 4160 volt substation breaker metal clad gear, feeding 4160 to 3 sets of gear with individual substation transformers. One section is 6000 amps and the others are 4000 and 2000 amps, 480/277 obviously.


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## 460 Delta

Good luck and a speedy recovery on the surgery. Keep us posted on the recovery.


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## MHElectric

MTW said:


> Just as a quick aside, this new section of the building has a 12,000 amp service fed directly with 4160 from their own cogen plant to a main 4160 volt substation breaker metal clad gear, feeding 4160 to 3 sets of gear with individual substation transformers. One section is 6000 amps and the others are 4000 and 2000 amps, 480/277 obviously.


Good for you, for trying something different out. That's what sets the boys apart from the men. Not being afraid to take a chance. 

Of all the hairbrained ideas and crazy different things I've tried out, industrial work has never been one of them. I've tried to get my feet wet with almost every other part of this trade, but for some reason, I have no interest in doing that. 

I did a lot of rigid pipe and tray cable on military base jobs when I did commercial construction, and I did NOT ENJOY IT!!! Romex and MC is SO much easier. Long jobs no longer interest me.


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## MTW

MHElectric said:


> Good for you, for trying something different out. That's what sets the boys apart from the men. Not being afraid to take a chance.
> 
> Of all the hairbrained ideas and crazy different things I've tried out, industrial work has never been one of them. I've tried to get my feet wet with almost every other part of this trade, but for some reason, I have no interest in doing that.
> 
> I did a lot of rigid pipe and tray cable on military base jobs when I did commercial construction, and I did NOT ENJOY IT!!! Romex and MC is SO much easier. Long jobs no longer interest me.


A union contractor installed the service, us rats aren't capable of understanding such complexity.


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## 460 Delta

MTW said:


> A union contractor installed the service, us rats aren't capable of understanding such complexity.


I see.


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## just the cowboy

Getting ready to start up a new pump station. I go out last week and find everything but lights and receptacles are in tray.
Motor cables are sleeved till they get to tray level.
4- 250hp motors, 3 - 125 hp motors, 3 flow meters, Gen, ATS, Power factor correction unit , Radio, SCADA terminal, HMI. 
All of that and only 4 inputs to PLC, everything else is IP Cat 6 tray cable.
I'll get pictures next time I'm out there.

Cowboy


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