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CAT5 for fan wire?

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shawkins

Member
Joined
May 28, 2005
Location
Tigard, Oregon
Hey all, Im about to buy a fan controller that has no wire leads for fans. You have to make your own. But it has screw erminals for wire. So I was thinking, that since CAT5 has 8 wires in it and I only need 2 wires per fan, that I could use CAT5 to wire up my fans and it would look alot cleaner. Anyone else ever do something like this?
 
Also, make sure not to let any of the wires touch eachother. Use heatshrink or electrical tape if possible.
 
It's a small conductor, so check it for overheating. The amperage that a high speed Delta runs at is much greater than the cable was designed for, so do it, but check it a couple of times before you trust it fully.
If it does heat up, you can always match up the pairs to lighten the load, like using blues/oranges for positive and green/browns for negative. That should have no problem.

PoE (power over ethernet) equipment only sends 12.95 watts (@48 volts) for a reason.
 
I've thought about something like this. For my next system I want to build a system for fan control that would give me a small box mounted hidden that I could connect the fans to, then run cat5 wire up to a fanbus to control the fans.

I've never done anything with it though.
 
Hey guys, just a tip..
The jacket on cat5 wiring makes a handy small sleeve for existing cables too. Just cut off a piece to length, strip a bit, then pull out the pairs one color/pair at a time.
I'll be using Lucent "cable sleeves" for my case's front wires because it's bright yellow and matches the sockets on my Lanparty 250gb.
Use a paint marker or something to denote where the positive wire goes before you pull the pins out of the connector.

It's not too flexible, but it's purty.
 
ƒÓÒl said:
It's a small conductor, so check it for overheating. The amperage that a high speed Delta runs at is much greater than the cable was designed for, so do it, but check it a couple of times before you trust it fully.
If it does heat up, you can always match up the pairs to lighten the load, like using blues/oranges for positive and green/browns for negative. That should have no problem.

PoE (power over ethernet) equipment only sends 12.95 watts (@48 volts) for a reason.


I was going to type a responce then I seen this, I could not have said it better.
 
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