Electronic – Electrical installation: how to label wires

design

When installing it is of course useful to label the wires to avoid having to trace them when modifications become necessary. I was wondering what people are using for this.

The following solutions I found unsatisfactory:

  • isolation tape: the glue is too "liquid"/"soft" causing the tape to slide on the wire and leave sticky residue. Also it tends to become even softer in warm environments and falls off over the span of a few years.

  • brown packing tape: while a good solution short term, the glue becomes hard and pulverises over the span of a few years causing the labels to fall off

Best Answer

Heat-shrink labels all the way. They never fade or fall off. But you may not be able to use them if the cables already have connectors at either end.

Heat shrink labels

You can get nice little labelling machines to write neatly on them.

Labeller

Alternatively, try cable clips, which can be clipped on after the connector.

cable clips

Another great one is these twist on cable labels.

twist on cable labels

There are literally dozens of solutions to this problem. If you want to google it, the key words are cable identification.