telephone wire

I would like to run a telephone wire to my garage. Can I bury a telephone cable as direct burial or do I have to run it in a pvc conduit. The underground length will be about 40'.
Thanks for your reply.

 

You can get direct burial wire at HD or Lowes.

 

You will need to update the wiring to your garage if it does not contain an Equipment Grounding Conductor (EGC) or if the grounded current carrying conductor of the feeder or branch circuit is bonded to ground at the garage. You will also need to install network protectors at both ends of the outdoor portions of the telephone line. The telephone protectors would be grounded to the grounding electrode at each building. All outdoor wiring needs to be protected from lightning at the point were it enters a building. In power wiring you ground the enclosure and the wire from the Xo of the supply transformer which is also grounded at the transformer. In telephone wiring we connect the tip and ring conductors of each phone line to the protector which shunts much of any stray energy to ground.
--
Tom

 

In order to bury a phone line to you garage it must be cable that is meant to be buried. Regular phone wire you buy to hook up phone jacks in the house isn't good enough. If you use sheilded cable it would be best. Since the network interface on the outside of your house is grounded you can hook the line to your garage up to that box. In my opinion if you bury the cable 6" and use sheilded cable there is no reason to add protectors, you can but it may be overkill and added expense. It is recommended that you not be on the phone in an electrical storm to begin with. When it comes to building codes and such phone wiring is not payed attention to. If it were then most of the customers that I run across would never be able to pass inspections with the rats nest they usually have. As I say frequently, in most cases plumbing, electric and gas are installed correctly but phone wiring is a free for all. Most people so it seems love to do their own phone wiring with whatever they can find laying around. Ive seen cut extension cords, speaker wire and bare copper to name a few things. The customers never admit to doing but they say "Well it works!?" At any rate, the short answer is... you can just bury the cable as long as its burial type cable 6" deep and run it into the garage to a jack or small punch down block if you want more than one and you will be fine. Ive been a tech for many years and I am not sure where a consumer could buy protectors. To my knowledge they don't sell them at home depot but I could be wrong, to be honest I haven't really looked all that close but I'll look next time.

 

It might be easier and cheaper to get one of the newer cordless phones that can support a wireless extension in a remote charger base in the garage...

Phonetek:

While many aspects of phone wiring are not addressed by codes, the electrical grounding rule for a remote structure are different if there is a metallic path (plumbing, phone wires, etc.) other than the electrical wiring between the remote structure and the main structure. This has been discussed extensively in this forum in the past.

 

I'm sorry but that must have been before my time in these forums. I was just saying that for a do it yourselfer running a phone line to a garage there should be no harm in not using protectors and a ground rod for a telephone line. They are simply not a consumer product that you can pick up at your local hardware store. The circuit is grounded and protected at many points from the C.O. to the N.I. I know here in Ameritech land there are many peds and xboxes that aren't grounded as they should be. To be honest the protectors really don't protect the customer equipment as expected anyway. I have done my fair share of replacing plenty of CPE which would include wiring, PBX and regular phones from a lighting strike. Protected or not it will still fry. Even circuit packs in the C.O. get hit now and then. I have seen lightning make it past the load coils on the MDF and still hit the equipment. If protectors worked that well they would sell phone jacks to the consumer with protectors built in. Back to running a line to the garage. If he were to run that cable underground and drill the hole to feed the garage below ground level I don't see how he can still be in harms way. I'm actually running a line to my garage in the next month or so and that's exactly what I plan to do. I'm definitely not going to hang another C.A.C. on the side of my garage.
As far as this subject being discussed in detail in this forum I would really enjoy to reading it. If you can send me a link to it I would appriciate it.

 

I'm not talking about what should or should not be put on the phone line in terms of protection, but that the existence of the phone line between the main structure and the outbuilding affects the grounding requirements on the electrical connection between the main structure and the outbuilding.

I don't remember the actual requirements, only that the whole issue of wiring remote structures is a recurring topic almost as popular as miswiring 3-way switches.

Do a forum search on "wiring detached garage" or some such thing and you will pull up some of the most arcane discussions ever seen on this forum.