tmbrown97
Senior Member
FWIW, I've done some creative connections just like you describe with LB boxes... I've tapped the side to do a water-tight cable fitting... with larger ones I've punched a larger hole in the side and done the threaded conduit fitting with the nut on the inside. It's totally doable, but I'm not sure how widely acceptable it would be to the electrical contractors. Luckily I only deal with LV and the only reason I'm dealing with the stuff is for structure protection (my wire is rated for sun exposure, underground, etc).
All that said, if you have the option of just doing a box inside, that's much cleaner. I have to do the Cat5 surge protection pretty often on my outdoor microwave installations. For the stuff I do, it's critical that you use shielded CatX wire and properly tie in the shielding and the copper drain wire into the surge device (I use polyphaser generally because it's spec'd by the manufacturers). I then try to get electrical ground as quick as I can and mount the polyphaser either right at the building entrance or as close to it as I can possibly get.
All that said, if you have the option of just doing a box inside, that's much cleaner. I have to do the Cat5 surge protection pretty often on my outdoor microwave installations. For the stuff I do, it's critical that you use shielded CatX wire and properly tie in the shielding and the copper drain wire into the surge device (I use polyphaser generally because it's spec'd by the manufacturers). I then try to get electrical ground as quick as I can and mount the polyphaser either right at the building entrance or as close to it as I can possibly get.