Often one of the first questions I have on a site visit is ‘what’s the cable path to your table’. The move to bring video and audio conferencing to more spaces is creating a need to put more equipment on the table. Things like microphones, control surfaces, video inputs and even power all require wires. Wire paths generally go from the table to the walls where they can find their way to the ceiling for speakers, behind displays or other parts of the room for cameras.
In new construction customers can have holes poked through the floor or trenches cut into the slab.
Unfortunately in existing rooms it can be very costly to create a poke through or a trench. So how do you bring cables to the table without creating a trip hazard. The simplest (though not recommend) way is to tape them down.
The trip hazard is fixed and the new tape lets everybody know where your cable path is! Not only is this an ugly solution it also does nothing to protect your cables. It will only take a couple roll overs from a conference room chair to kill the cables under this tape.
My go to solution for these situations is Connectrac. They make a terrific floor raceway that can either go over the carpet or under it if your lucky enough to be in a room where they are replacing the flooring. There are built in channels allowing us to run both power and low voltage cabling through it.
The over carpet raceway is about 10″ wide and ADA compliant. You can walk and run chairs over it all day long and the cables will remain protected. If your working in a a space where they are putting down new floors they make one that can go under the carpet as well, though its really more IN the carpet.
This solution creates a gentle slope with the raceway built into the floor and the top cap slides off to give you access to the wirepath. It does require coordination between us and the flooring installer but the finished product is clean, safe and secure.
Off to the next project!