Empty cable reels in Utah

Cerrowire in Ogden: building wire made in Utah

Cerrowire lists a plant in Ogden on its own contact page. Cerrowire is best known for copper building wire, the NM-B and THHN that electricians pull through houses, apartments and offices. Building wire ships on small and mid reels, from plywood spools up to 30 and 42 inch nailed reels, and a plant like Ogden's sends a steady flow of them out to distributors across the Mountain West.

Two things follow for anyone with reels in northern Utah. First, the reels a building wire plant ships are exactly the sizes electrical contractors end up holding empty, so the Wasatch Front has plenty of them. Second, those sizes stack densely: Sonoco's packing guide puts up to 200 reels of a 36-inch flange in one 53-foot van, which keeps the freight per reel low.

One utility, many small ones

PacifiCorp, which does business in Utah as Rocky Mountain Power, sold 27,138,091 MWh at retail in 2024. Every other utility on EIA's Utah list is tiny by comparison. Provo City Corp and the City of St George are municipal systems that sold well under a million MWh each, and Dixie Escalante Rural Electric Association and Moon Lake Electric are cooperatives in the south-west and the Uinta Basin.

So most of the state's heavy reel work, the substations, feeders and transmission, goes through PacifiCorp and its contractors. The city systems and co-ops add smaller, steadier piles of URD and service reels. Both are worth writing up.

A natural crossroads for trailers

Salt Lake City sits where I-15 and I-80 cross. I-15 runs the length of the state from Idaho through Ogden, Salt Lake, Provo and Cedar City to St. George and on to Las Vegas. I-80 runs east into Wyoming and west across the salt flats to Nevada. I-84 leaves I-15 near Ogden for Idaho and Oregon, and I-70 starts off I-15 in central Utah and heads east toward Colorado.

That makes the Wasatch Front a sensible place to gather reels from the whole region. A trailer collecting empties in Idaho or western Wyoming can top off in Ogden or Salt Lake before heading to a buyer. Equally, a Utah lot that is too small to justify its own truck can ride with reels from a neighboring state.

St. George and the south-west corner

St. George is one of the fastest-growing places in Utah, and the City of St George ranks third among the state's retailers despite its size. Growth there means new subdivisions, new feeders and a steady run of URD reels. Lots from Washington County are about 300 miles from Salt Lake City by I-15 but only around 120 from Las Vegas, so a St. George pile may be better paired with southern Nevada than with the Wasatch Front.

Winter on the Wasatch, summer in the desert

Northern Utah winters bring snow to the valley floor and heavy snow to the canyons. Reels stored flat collect snow between the flanges and freeze to the ground. In southern Utah, summer sun dries flange plies until they check. Neither ruins a reel quickly, but both are reasons to stand reels on their flanges on blocking and to send a pile to market sooner rather than later.

Inversion season in the Salt Lake valley doesn't affect trucks much. Snow on I-80 through Parleys Canyon and over the Wyoming line sometimes does.

BEAD in Utah

Utah's BEAD allocation in NTIA's June 2023 table is $317,399,741.54. Unserved locations are scattered across rural counties: the Uinta Basin, the central valleys and the south. Fiber crews there need clean small and mid reels with drums at least 20 times the cable's diameter, as NEMA WC 26 sets for fiber, and never under 12 inches.

How to get a Utah lot priced

• Sizes as flange x traverse x drum, read from the stencil. Cerrowire, Southwire and other makers stencil the size on the flange.
• A count per size. Stand them up and count by group.
• One photo of the pile, one stencil photo per size.
• City or ZIP and loading access: forklift, dock or none.
• Anything you know is damaged, especially split arbor holes and loose flanges.