Category Archives: Yard & Outdoors

The Challenge of Landscaping Small Yards

The Challenge of Landscaping Small Yards

Landscaping projects, no matter how big or small, requires thorough research and advanced planning. This is also true in landscaping small yards. One should be meticulous in doing such because of the limited space requires just the exact and perfect fitting ornaments so that the project would look good despite its size.

Modification
Landscaping is all about changing the land’s appearance, modifying such for personal satisfaction or to upgrade the land’s value in the market. The change could vary from simply changing the plants in it or arranging the structures in the area to hauling up, digging further and constructing materials that could really drastically change the landscape.

Perfect Fit
In doing the modifications for small yards, one must first assess the size or the part of the land to be used. Based on the calculated size, you may proceed with research first and then you can plan.

In researching, the same rule applies as to those projects with big landscapes. You must first know about the place well enough, its weather conditions, the type of soil in it and the plants that would grow in the place.

Information as abovementioned could be gathered in landscaping books and magazines. The Web has also vast information and pictures for such projects that you may want to see first to have an idea of the different styles that you may opt to replicate or combine one or two styles. You may also create your own if you are knowledgeable in the process. And asking around will also a lot, especially when you get to talk with people whose landscaping are excellent. You would really get an idea of what to do and also what not to do in the process so that you’d have minimal errors once you sit down on your project.

When you have a small yard, planning should be simple yet very detailed. The type of plants that you may opt to use should be placed accordingly. Be mindful of the color and the sizes of the plants, as well as the positioning of each because you can actually make the land appear larger than it is through the use of such ornaments.

Structuring Each Element
When you plan on landscaping for a small yard, you need to have a structure for everything. You need to know how much space would each ornament consume because in the process, you need to maximize everything. You need to utilize each free space to make the land appear larger than it really is and so that no one could actually fault the place as to having to much at such its small size.

You may still have other materials in the area like some fence or a water element such as a small pond or simple fountain maybe, this just depends on the placing of each material. All these could be laid out in the plan, but you can still do minor changes once you’re already into the process and is actually seeing what the blueprint looks like in reality.

Landscaping small yards may be quite a challenge. But when one is equipped with the right knowledge and the proper materials, mistakes would be minimal. The advantage of having a small yard is that it is easy to maintain so you are free to choose from a wide variety of ornaments as long as you’re sure that those would survive in the place’s conditions.

The Secret Of Successful Fiber Optic Cable Management

The Secret Of Successful Fiber Optic Cable Management

Why is proper fiber optic cable management so critical?

Service providers have deployed more and more fiber optic cables for their high bandwidth, low costs, greater reliability and flexibility. But just deploying is not enough; a successful fiber network also requires a solid infrastructure based on a professional fiber optic cable management system.

Fiber optic cable management affects a network’s reliability, performance, cost and maintenance. It provides the ability to reconfigure network, restore service and implement new services quickly.

Four goals to achieve with professional fiber optic cable management

1. Protect fiber optic cable from microbends and macrobends loss

Microbends are small deformities in the optical fiber and macrobends are larger bends of the fiber cable. Fiber bends beyond the specified minimum bending radius can cause signal loss or even break the fiber, causing service disruption.

As a rule of thumb, the minimum bending radius should be bigger than ten times the outer diameter of the fiber cable. Telcordia recommends a minimum 38mm bending radius for 3mm fiber optic patch cords.

Fiber optic cable management system should provide bend radius protection at all points where a fiber optic cable makes a bend. This helps ensure the network’s long-term reliability; thus reduces the network operation cost by reducing network down time.

2. Well defined fiber optic cable management routing paths

The leading cause of fiber optic cable minimum bend radius violation is improper routing of fibers by fiber installation technicians.

In a proper fiber cable management system, routing paths are clearly defined and easy to follow; such that the technician has no other option but to route the cables properly.

Well defined routing paths reduce the training time required for technicians and increase the uniformity of work done. It also makes accessing individual fibers easier, quicker and safer.

3. Easy access to installed optical fibers

Allowing easy access to installed fibers is critical in maintaining proper bend radius protection. The system should be designed to ensure that individual fibers can be installed or removed without inducing a macrobend on an adjacent fiber. Accessibility is critical during network reconfiguration.

4. Physical protection of installed optical fibers

Well defined fiber optic cable management system physically protects the fibers from accidental damage by technicians and equipment throughout the network.

Fiber optic cable management system procurement

When making the decision on purchasing your fiber optic cable management systems, the goal is getting the most cost-effective system that provides the best cable management, flexibility, and growth capabilities.

Going with the cheapest approaches for fiber optic cable management can cost more money in the long run. A strong fiber cable management system will enable you to extract the maximum value from your installed optical fiber networks.

Specifying Fiber Cable Management Systems: Cost and Value

As a means of keeping operational costs down, service providers around the world are increasingly turning to systems integrators to install their networks.

This practice allows the service provider’s technicians to focus on operations and maintenance, rather than network installation. There is, however, an inherent risk in this practice.

As the purchasing decision for the fiber cable management system moves from the service provider’s engineering group to the systems integration prime contractor, the cable management features of the distribution system are generally not specified.

What can happen, then, is the equipment installed may lack key features and functionalities. In light of the importance of proper cable management within the ODF, the service provider needs to specify the basic requirements for the cable management system.

There are several industry-standard specifications that can assist service providers in writing specifications for their cable management systems. Two of these specifications are:

• Telcordia Generic Requirements for Fiber Distribution Frames GR-449-CORE, Issue 2, July 2003

• Network Equipment Building System (NEBS) Generic Equipment Requirements, TR-NWT-000063

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