Can any one please show me some examples of equipment racks. I have been installing for years and am interested in what a tidy rack should really look like. Would love people to post some original ideas about cable management braiding etc.

Keep going to jobs and seeing absolute nightmares. I always believe that we install racks and cable in a neat and thoughtful way, but would like to compare what we do to what others are doing out there. Unfortunately I don't have any reasonable quality photos that I can post.

Thanks in advance

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And here is something I found at Trump West by Cox Cable guys:

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[Link: remotecentral.com]

[Link: remotecentral.com]

[Link: remotecentral.com]

 

One thing that will make a huge difference is putting together a rack elevation for your installers to follow. Whether its 1 rack or 4 its always best to load your gear in following the signal path. Sources>>Switchers>>Amps. This will cut down on the number of cables crossing each others paths for no reason.

Rack elevations will also allow you to see/decide if you have enough surge/UPS for the gear. How many times have you seen 2 or 3 power strips plugged into each other hanging from zipties as a last minute effort to accommodate all the devices?

Another tip is to reevaluate the different types of cable you are using. The fewer types of cables the fewer types of connectors and cable management issues. Get rid of 16/4 and only use 14/4. Use Cat5 for as many things as possible. In Crestron land you can ditch component-composite-svideo and use room solution boxes.

Patch panels. They make all of your Cat5/6 voice/data cables readily available. Once they are punched down you can easily test every cable, you wont have them running down the sides of the racks in your way and you can change a LAN jack to a VIDEO balun by moving the patch cable. We take speaker cable directly to the amps. All cat and coax to patch panels. Cresnet to distribution blocks.

Custom patch cables. We make custom patch cables to eliminate excess cable being stashed on the sides of the racks. I use Liberty 23 gauge coax for patch cables. Its easy to manage because they are tiny.

Can you expand on this, oh wise one?  I'm intrigued...

Obviously you have to make real world decisions on-site like not putting the DVD player at the top of the rack even if your switchers take up all the space below it but for the most part you can follow this diagram.

39, i have always put my amps at the top. why do put at bottom?

Because they are heavy :). They are the only thing in the house that gets hard wired. Everything else goes to patch panels. They rarely need to be touched. I usually wire the amps up first and get them out of the way. Its alot nicer to be able to stand up and wire up a switcher. Or sit in some cases :). I don't mind kneeling down to connect the few wires to an amp but it would be murder dealing with a video switcher.

We have been doing this for more than 10 years and it has been paying off lately as we upgrade clients. The amps and speaker cable doesn't get touched. I just rip out the sources and switchers.

I know that some put them at the top for heat but these days with all the DVR's in the rack everything is hot so thermal management is necessary making hot product placement irrelevant IMO.

Me too. I was always concerned that any heat rising off the amps could affect the equipment above and that fans might add noise to the system if I did need to cool down down amps mounted on the bottom.

Was I being too paranoid on this?

I always put my amps on the bottom and DVRs are always at the top. I dont however wire a Rack nearly as awesome as some of you guys. I try and I always think I've suceeded until Roddy or one of the other few RackMasters posts a photo.

Those racks are from our lead installer, he wires them much better than I do. I am getting pretty good at taking pictures of the though!! ;)

We always put the amps at the bottom too, I do not want to think about a top heavy rack. We space out each amp with a 1u blank and put a Middle Atlantic comp cooler on the top of each amp.

We will vary our amp placement, Some have them high to help reduce heat. While others have them low for weight.

Some from our jobs. We are not there yet but my guys are getting better. There might be things that are not very well done but there might also be some that you can learn from.

Some early jobs:














Termination behind racks:








This one in is almost ready to go this week: