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Had to pick between a fusion splicer rental for $200 a day or the old mechanical splice kit for my fiber job in Denver last Tuesday
I went with the mechanical splices to save cash and ended up redoing half of them after four hours cause the light loss was too high, anyone else sworn off those things for good?
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dakota_murphy903d agoMost Upvoted
Keep going with the mechanical splices honestly, they forced me to actually slow down and get my prep right. I remember my first few jobs in Denver with a rental fusion splicer and I got sloppy with the cleaves because the machine did all the thinking for me. Then one snowy Tuesday outside of Aurora, I had to do a repair on a line where the battery on the fusion rig died and my backup mechanical kit saved my butt. Yeah you lose some light but if you really clean the fiber and use the right gel, you can get loss down to 0.2 or 0.3 dB which is totally fine for most residential or small business drops. The fusion splicer is nice but it makes you soft and you end up paying for that rental fee even if you only use it for two hours because of the minimum day charge.
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Learned that lesson the hard way too. Cheap today, expensive tomorrow.
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