- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, I'm gonna show you the safe way
to tape down cable at your event.
Oftentimes, as an AV company,
we have to run all our cable across doorways,
there's no way to go up and over,
there's no mouse holes underneath the doorway
or anything like that,
so we're forced to run it across a doorway.
We don't tape cable that goes across a wall
or anything like that,
we just tape down exposed cable that is a tripping hazard.
So the way to tape your cable correctly is this.
You pull it out, you string it across.
So say this is coming from a projector
all the way up to the screen,
so you run your cable.
For me, I tape one end down.
Depending on how many cables you're taping,
I like to align them all so they're flat,
so they're not all going around each other down the run
and not standing up.
You wanna make sure they're nice and flat.
So sometimes if you're running, like, four cables together,
it can be beneficial to tape right in the middle,
just to hold them all in position.
For this example, there's just one cable,
so what I do is I gently pull on the end,
I put another piece of tape there,
then I grab one piece of gaff tape,
make sure it's centered,
and you run it the whole duration of the cable.
Now, I do wanna point out
that I'm using three-inch gaff tape here,
it's three inches wide.
Don't buy anything less than three-inch.
Yes, it's expensive.
Our tape budget here
is in the thousands of dollars each month
that we spend on gaff tape.
That sucks, honestly, it sucks to pay that,
but when you use two-inch gaff tape,
or you use duct tape or something like this,
it just doesn't work.
I'm gonna show you something,
we're working at a school for a tri-grad or something,
and I'm gonna show you the way that we often see it.
And honestly, there's no point in even doing it this way,
this is the wrong way.
People will use gaff tape,
or they will use duct tape instead of gaff tape,
and it'll only be two inches wide.
What they'll do is they'll tape it there,
they'll tape the end,
we see this at school gyms all the time,
couple times a week we'll see this,
and then they'll do this.
This doesn't do anything.
One, this tape is not sticky enough,
two, it's sticky in a weird way
where it'll leave a ton of residue all over your cable,
and three, this doesn't prevent anybody from tripping on it.
You're still gonna trip on it.
The only thing this does is it makes it visible
for if your guests are walking there,
they see a whole bunch of duct tape across it.
Whenever we see this at an event that we're at,
then we have to come, grab our tape,
and we make it safe
by just putting three-inch over the whole thing.
Now, it's also worth noting that if you are using duct tape,
that will leave residue on your floor as well.
Gaff tape, if you buy the nice gaff tape,
it's not supposed to leave any residue whatsoever,
so you can use it on gym floors or wood floors.
If you pull it up softly at the end of the night,
it won't cause any damage to your floor.
For sure for carpet or anything like that,
gaff tape is the way to go.
Now, sometimes, at the request of a client,
if we're crossing a doorway or an entrance
or something like that,
they'll ask us to make the cable more visible,
and instead of using duct tape,
what we do is we will split a roll of green gaff tape,
we'll put it right on the hump of the cable,
so right where the cable is,
we just run it right down the center.
If it's super important that it's visible,
and you feel like setting your money on fire,
you can tape a pattern, you can do something like this.
I don't recommend it,
but some people specifically really want it more visible.
You can do a pattern like that, it just looks ugly,
so then what I do is I tape up all the ends,
something like that, to just hide it.
But there you can see
that we kinda made our own high-vis pattern on it.
These are all options you can do.
For us, most of the time,
just a single strip of three-inch gaff tape
does the trick for anything up to four cables.
Once you go wider than that, we recommend using a cable mat
or something that's more substantial
and more safe for your guests.
If you have any questions or comments on the video,
or if you see anything else
that you want us to make a video on,
please leave a comment in the comment section below.
Thank you for watching.