Broken CBus wire

Hi

Hoping to get some help - I have an 8 Channel Relay (powered) and the CBus (pink wire) has failed, and we can't run a new cable from the house to where the Relay is in a pump shed.

Are there any options?

Cheers
Stu

 

Very little, if any options.

 

Hi Stu,

Agree with Ashley in the main, better to dig in a new one but there are some possible avenues to try out if you & your sparky are committed to not digging a new conduit in eg. hard surfaces or paving etc.

First, you may have a cable tester with inbuilt TDR or something close. Often sparkys have Flukes which can tell you the distance to the fault, whether its open circuit or shorrted. My cheaper tester is a Datamaster T0046 Professional LAN & Coaxial Cable Tester and it also works well to give a distance and through pins and is costed well at about $220.

This distance to fault info gives you a clue where to dig to possibly do a cable rejoin etc. I will also tell you any cable cores that may actually still be operational end to end. You can get away with just two OK cable traces out of the 8 in the pink to a small remote board if you have to, one for C-Bus positive and one for C-Bus negative.

If you only have a standard multimeter, you can cut the pink cable at each end, join all wires together in one BC connector at one end and measure between cores at the other. Any that are low ohms value are probably through cable traces and may be OK to use. If you can get 4 cores of any mix of colours / whites, you may be able to get the C-Bus link back up.

That's about all I can suggest other than dig it up, but you might be able to reduce the size of the trench /hole with the 'known' distance to fault..

Cheers,

Brad



.