{"id":379,"date":"2010-06-13T21:26:27","date_gmt":"2010-06-13T20:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=379"},"modified":"2025-06-16T18:38:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T16:38:27","slug":"buying-cable-by-the-metre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"Buying cable by the metre…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…or not…?<\/p>\n

For the second time this year I have encountered a strange way to handle cable-deliveries here in Sweden. I haven’t experienced anything like this before, so I don’t think it is something typical Swedish<\/em> like moose or meatballs — probably it is only an indication on how companies treat their customers nowadays.<\/p>\n

The first time it happened a couple of months ago when I bought a 10 m pack of standard power cable (H07RN 3G2.5 for those of you who know what that means) at the Uppsala store of ClasOhlson. The cable was shrink-wrapped and labeled as a 10 m pack of this cable.<\/p>\n

You can imagine my surprise when I unpacked the cable to find that it actually contained two 5 m pieces of the cable. Even more surprising though was the way, how the two pieces were spliced together in the middle:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
2 × 5 m = 10 m <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I was still active in the German navy choir Blaue Jungs aus Bremerhaven<\/em> I was very interested in knots and splices — and this work of art doesn’t need to hide. However, I doubt its usefulness in the case of a cable…<\/p>\n

Now something similar happened last week. For our roof-top test site for solar cells at the \u00c5ngstr\u00f6m laboratory I ordered 50 m of multicore cable with 52 × 0.34 mm2<\/sup> conductors. In fact I needed two pieces: one of slightly more than 30 m and one shorter length of about 15 m. However, this the distributor company Elfa could not have known. I intended to order shielded cable, but according to the web-shop of Elfa this had a couple of days lead time so I decided to go for the unshielded cable which should work just fine in this application.<\/p>\n

When the delivery came the day after I again couldn’t believe my eyes. The company had decided to send me a roll with 33 m of this cable and put the remaining 17 m down as a second delivery at an unspecified date. OK, I needed the two lenghts of wire and the deliberate partitioning into 33 m and 17 m fitted my needs — but this is not what I expect as a customer! And especially not with a cable which comes with a price tag of around EUR 10\/m.<\/p>\n

Germany just won 4:1 over Australia in the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…or not…? For the second time this year I have encountered a strange way to handle cable-deliveries here in Sweden. I haven’t experienced anything like this before, so I don’t think it is something typical Swedish like moose or meatballs — probably it is only an indication on how companies treat their customers nowadays. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics_en","category-everything_en","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48grL-67","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2548,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/2548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}