Cable is just cable, right? Not so, says ICE Cable Systems chief executive and founder Brian Rizzo.

ICE recently entered the Australian marketplace through a distribution agreement with Avation.

“We know the Australian market is dominated by generic wire and cable products. We want to do here what we have achieved in the US, which is to provide the integrator with significantly better product quality and associated huge labour savings,” Brian says.

“Ten years ago, I started ICE Cable Systems after investigating the existing products available to residential installers. Basically, they sucked.

“Installers were forced to buy rubbish cable in flimsy brown boxes and they were paying a lot for it.

“Plus, they had to buy cable from three or four different suppliers because nobody carried a full line. It was simply a bad deal for them.

“To make matters worse, after going to the trouble of sourcing sub-standard product from multiple suppliers, they then had to approach their clients with brown boxes with garbage inside.”

Somebody had to fix this, Brian says.

“I decided to build my own line of cabling products, plugging all the gaps that existed in the category.

“The solution was to fix all the problems from the ground up. I thought about every way we could improve the look of the cable and the cable’s delivery system, the build quality and how to make it faster to pull. We incorporated a lot of improvements and updated the markings, print legends and the cable design itself, to make it easier and faster to use.”

Understandably, selling premium cable in a market that can be conscious of price can be incredibly difficult. Increasing manufacturing costs, such as the cost of copper, doesn’t help the matter.

“Unfortunately, ‘brown box’ suppliers have turned to potentially dangerous methods to keep their prices down. For one, they have started to use less copper in their products, which of course affects the performance of the cable. They have also made reductions in the compounds and jackets, which affect the safety of the cable.

“There’s a lot of liability concerns attached to this. In the US, for example, if you install cables that aren’t certified and a house goes up in flames, you could be liable for damages. These are the kinds of risks some suppliers are knowingly promoting through the use of inferior cable.

“ICE Cable is built to the letter, in terms of specifications.”

ICE recently unveiled its new Big Mouth Payout (BMP) bulk wire and cable box, which incorporates a number of distinct design advantages that help integrators run more efficiently on the jobsite – 4” payout hole and proprietary winding pattern, ascending and descending foot-markers, and ultra-durable, weather resistant cardboard box with reinforced handles.

According to Brian, the payout is more than twenty times larger than what’s currently available on the market today.

“Our payout and wind pattern help eliminate everyday pull-problems like kinking, knotting, recoil and tangling. Removing these obstacles makes a one-man wire pull, for example from atop a ladder, significantly easier.”

Also, incorporated on the cable jackets are ascending and descending foot-markers which make it effortless for the integrator to identify how much cable has been used and how much remains. The result is optimal usage of the entire wind and the elimination of scrap; it also solves the common problem of tracking usage which can often be difficult when more than one technician pulls from the same box.

Finally, to withstand abuse on the jobsite, the BMP box is comprised of an extremely durable water resistant cardboard along with dual-layer reinforced handles. According to Brian the cardboard is burst-tested to withstand 21kg of force, which far surpasses what is currently available in the channel today.

“The biggest frustration for most cable installers is a pull box that doesn’t pull, or falls apart,” Brian says.

“I knew that if ICE Cables was going to reach the next level then that was a problem that we had to solve. So, we developed a proprietary winding system that eliminates all of the kinking and knotting and tangling that guys run into pulling cable.

“We also spent a lot of time putting boxes together that are basically built like a tank, which will hold up onsite.”

So, the next time you see a colleague reach for a brown box of cable, remind them that plain brown packaging is reserved for alcoholic winos. Not professional installers.