If Italy is anything like Spain nobody gives a crap about building code stuff.

When I moved into my apartment it had just been "certified" by an electrician which took a week. There were outlets without covers on them. Exposed live stripped wires hanging in the hallway. Ground wire to the breaker box but not actually connected to the rest of the house. Exposed terminal blocks hanging everywhere. I doubt this "professional" even bothered to visit the place and just cashed a royal fee to sign the paperwork.

It's a total joke. If this crap gets "certified" then a DC cable beside an AC one In a conduit is really no issue :)

Please don't call certification a joke and diminish its value.

If you see clearly illegal things, report them. The person doing the certification can have their license revoked.

Things aren't always ideal but please don't turn this into a laughing matter.

I know HN frowns upon this but location really matters, and op's response is valid and non-laughing in many places. "Certification matters" cannot be resolved as a statement without location / situation.

If I reported such a situation in Canada, it may or may not have satisfactory official resolution before heat death of the universe. One can hope.

If I reported such a situation where I was born, at best nothing would happen ; more likely I would get laughed at. (At worst, electrician and their 3 buddies would teach me a valuable lesson about how things work around these here parts).

Very much depends on location within Canada. BC has an open policy of allowing suites not to code for example

Maybe he did report them and maybe their license wasn't revoked. He's only repeating a joke that the electrician and the certification committee told him. I wouldn't blame the victim, here.

You can with fiber and it is allowed. I used these special plates[1] in my setup[2] that are meant to be run in the same conduit as power. Switzerland is quite strict with electrical codes so I was surprised when I found out I could do this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARSpp4B9-X4

[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

Glass and plastic don't conduct electricity.

For glass, that's true in normal temperatures/voltages, but when it gets hot/melts it starts being a conductor instead. Same if the voltage is high enough, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_strength#Break_down... for a table and description about that effect.

Yes, I know and you're right but it's only a short path (about 2 meters), and it's the only way I found to get through the cable from a room to another. Anyway I haven't terminated the cable with the wall jack, the cable is going out of the wall "intact", this should be a bit safer.

You might want to check if that out of code solution could invalidate your homeowners insurance policy. It sure can in the US.

I've seen this claim a lot, but what is the actual legal basis for it? Contractual language in specific policies? Assorted state laws? Homeowners insurance generally covers negligence by the owner (otherwise you'd be out of luck for many types of events). A homeowner modifying wiring in a way that causes a problem would seem to fall squarely into this category.

Legal basis? Ask a lawyer, but I suspect it's buried in contract law.

Homeowners insurance generally covers negligence by the owner

Does it?

I just know several people who have done their own 'renovations' that have had insurance claims turned down (even after arbitration) because they didn't have a licenses contractor do the work. People who insisted they knew better than anyone else. Typical.

So rewire at your own risk, I guess.

Especially now that it's publicly available on the internet. And yes, the fire investigators for home insurance DO check things like that.

Sounds like a good excuse to run a bit of fiber

Sure, and as said you won't likely have any issue, and maybe - without knowing - you actually used a U0=400V cable, the norm is 2010 or so if I recall correctly, so I believe that most Cat 6 cables in commerce are nowadays certified for that use.

Just checked, and I see only EIA/TIA 568B.2 ISO/IEC 11801 EN501

Can you please elaborate? Sadly your linked document is in Italian, which poses a language barrier for most of the community here.

Until that norm (as said I believe around 2010 or so) you could NOT mix low voltage (and signal) cables with mains (220V-240V AC usually) within a same conduit.

The new norm allows this mixing as long as the low voltage cables are certified as having insulation for 400 V.

Still you cannot strip the cable (i.e. you cannot put a terminator/receptacle) in the same box as mains.

The code is mainly about electrical safety, it doesn't consider the possibility of interference, that is "your" problem (but shielded cables give no problems in practice).

The National Electric Code in the US has similar provisions:

> 300.3

> (C) Conductors of Different Systems.

> (1) 600 Volts, Nominal, or Less. Conductors of ac and dc

> circuits, rated 600 volts, nominal, or less, shall be permitted

> to occupy the same equipment wiring enclosure, cable, or

> raceway. All conductors shall have an insulation rating

> equal to at least the maximum circuit voltage applied to any

> conductor within the enclosure, cable, or raceway.

Basically idea is to prevent a low/less voltage cable from potentially being energized by a higher voltage cable. It would suck to strip the ends off your CAT6 and discover it's been energized to 240v.

But keep in mind many times electrical conduit is not used as a bona fide conduit, but rather more of a physical convenience (note how the bit you quoted is talking about conductors not cables. So if you bury a length of PVC pipe (grey or white) with a cat6 network cable plus a UF power cable (required for the wet location, regardless of the pipe), you're fine.

Although residential in the US rarely (never?) goes above 170 volts (peak), which is more forgiving than the ~325V of most of the world.

I believe that a grey non-metallic conduit piece would meet the definition of a raceway in article 100 (to which the insulation rating rules would apply). A white PVC pipe is not “expressly designed” for that use (and would therefore clearly not be a raceway).

Article 100 defines a raceway as “An enclosed channel designed expressly for holding wires, cables, or bus bars, with additional functions as permitted in this Code”

At least in Italy, that would apply as well.

I.e. you can have in same conduit a "protected" (double insulation) mains cable (the type is called FG16 now, it was FG7) and a low voltage/signal cable.

The idea is that the FG cable in itself, having the external insulation besides the single wire insulation and being suitable to "unprotected" installation can coexist with signal cables, the conduit in this case is only an added mechanical protection.

The type of certified 400 V insulated cables I mentioned earlier is instead allowed to coexist with "normal" single wires (this is the normal way electricity is distributed in buildings) inside a conduit.

The issue using FG cables (besides the fact that it is way harder to be inserted in small conduits) might be that it would be suitable to power (say) a mains receptacle (live+neutral+earth) but wouldn't be suitable for (still say) a diverter or a reverse switch due to the colour coding of the wires.

A cable is at least one wire which is a conductor, they use the term conductor because the standard applies to more than wires and cables.

Claiming a conduit is just a convenience doesn't change anything.

Where did you get the 170/325 numbers? In residential applications it's 220-240v for most of the world. North America uses split phase for most outlets but major appliances still run on 220-240v.

I think it's going to come down to the AHJ, or your own judgement if there is no inspection. The way I've seen it explained on electrician forums is that you're not using the piece of PVC for its properties as conduit under the electric code (like say outer damage protection/containment for running single THHNs), so it isn't considered a conduit. But it would obviously be wrong to apply this argument to things like conduit fill or abrasion protection - regardless whether the pipe was manufactured intended for electrical conduit or not.

While they call mains voltage 120V, that's actually RMS voltage and not peak voltage. The peak is 170V, which I think is a better gauge for thinking about insulation and safety (by the time power is being resistively dissipated, you've already lost). Residential "240V" circuits use opposing legs of a split phase, so nothing is more than 170V from ground, which is what matters for insulation and most failure modes. You're not going to get any more of a shock from a "240V" residential circuit than a "120V" one unless you manage to touch both ungrounded conductors at the same time - it's the arc flash risk that gets worse.

Although now that I'm really thinking about it, maybe mixing insulation types is not foolproof at the extremes. If there is a wire with 170V inside sitting in free space, the worst case assumption is that it can have 170V on the outside of its insulation as well (due to the parasitic resistance and capacitance across the insulation, and ignoring the parasitics to ground. If this sounds strange to you, think about how those non-contact voltage testers can work). So if you put a grounded conductor with a low insulation rating right next to it, that insulation could have voltage across it higher than its own rating (depending on its parasitic R/C), which may cause it to break down over time. The possibility is likely moot with real world values, but still.

Two problems - mains lines could come in contact with the data lines which would then transmit power to things connected to them (or burn up). Fiber won't do this because it doesn't transmit.

And the second is that mains lines are AC and could introduce noise into the wired lines - again, fiber isn't susceptible to this.

Yeah, you shouldn’t. But most of the time it works anyway.

But you’re right, I haven’t seen any professional installation, that doesn’t use CAT 7 for a long time.