On the Reolinkcam subreddit they are big on if you are wiring your house internally with ethernet cable do not use Copper Clad Aluminum cable only full copper cabling?
Why is this?
Does it make that much of a difference?
Genuinely curious to know as locally for me the cost is quite high for full copper cabling
I do this as a job. Network engineer here.
If I find CCA, I replace it. If I am told not to replace it, I refuse to do the job (I am no longer told not to replace it, and of course, I don’t think we have any left in the company at any location.)
I have found boxes of CCA when I went looking for some cable in one of our warehouses. They were sent to recycle.
CCA is not suitable for pretty much any purpose as far as I am concerned.
CCA exists because it is far cheaper to make and sell, not because of the process to coat aluminum in a thin layer of copper, but because aluminum is far cheaper than copper. It’s a cost savings for the manufacturer, not the consumer. Any savings realized by the consumer is incidental, and generally made up for by the poorer performance of the CCA.
As mentioned by many others, the physical expansion and contraction of the aluminum is not even remotely similar to that of copper, use of CCA for PoE is not advised, even by some manufacturers of it, and fellow network field service techs and engineers will simply not leave the answer to the question that no one but procurement department accountants asked in any location that they are responsible for. Wall fires are kinda hard to spot, you might agree, and CCA is like mice in your walls, as where you find one, you find ten thousand.
Yes, CCA is cheaper, but you give up many things for that reduction in price. CCA gets hotter, CCA doesn’t work as well for integrity of data transfer over an equal distance than copper, CCA requires additional work to prevent oxidization and increase in resistance over time, which itself adds to the heat problem, and if the manufacturer cheaps out by producing a proper quality cable, what else are they cheaping out on (I have encountered some of the most brittle cable sheathing and wire cladding I have ever seen on CCA, like the stuff was made, then exposed to UV for far too long, and that was a problem when the protection of the sheathing was lost, which caused wires in the cable to come into contact with each other, requiring replacement when it would no longer do the one job it was put in place for.)
CCA. Not even once.