Hello: I have a situation I would like your feedback on. We are doing a 25,000 square foot, 2 story building. We have 90 "data outlets" scattered through the building. The original bid drawings defined a data outlet as: 2 strands of fiber, 1 Cat. 5e cable, 1 duplex utility receptacle and 1 duplex UPS fed receptacle. The fiber and data cables go back to the server room, to adjacent patch panels. The owner wants to change the data outlet to be 3 Cat. 6 cables in place of the 1 Cat. 5e. So, essentially, 2 more cables to each location. I just received the contractor's quote and here is the problem. The contractor has quoted 15,000 feet of cable for each run, thats a little high but ok. The labor is 120 hours. He has quoted all 3 Cat. 6 runs individually for a total of 360 hours, with a 120 hour credit for the Cat. 5e that was deleted, for a total of 240 hours additional labor. My question is this: since he is already pulling cable to the same location, why the full labor charge for each cable? He will be able to pull them all together, at the same time. My opinion is that there should be no, or very little, extra labor charge. I understand he has more cables to terminate and test, but that is quoted separately, and I don't argue with that. Any ideas on how to get them to be more reasonable? Or - do you think their numbers are correct? How much extra labor would be reasonable?
thanks for your input.
