What is a releasable cable tie? Well, it’s a reusable cable tie that has a form of trigger which, when pressed or rocked, will release the engaging teeth in the head from the ratcheted ladder molded along the length of the cable tie.
Releasable cable ties have been around for some time now, and their main purpose is to be used when you are installing a large number of cables or if you need to add to the cable run over a period of time. The cables can be mounted and zipped into place, and when you need to run another cable along the same run, you can simply release each cable tie as you come to it, lay in the cable, and then re-zip the tie.
They have many other uses as well, such as securing the contents of bags and sacks while enabling you to add or remove from the bag as needed. You simply release the trigger.
When putting up temporary signs, if this is an ongoing process, the releasable tie comes into its own again.
One last use for the releasable cable tie is securing a car's hubcaps. Many people use a cable tie to prevent the hubcap from working loose or coming off completely. Should you need to remove the hubcap, you would have to cut a normal cable tie, whereas a releasable tie could be easily removed without needing a cutter in the car. However, you likely wouldn't be able to reuse the tie in this case because you would have had to cut the waste tail off during installation, which means you wouldn’t be able to re-thread the tail through the head of the tie.
The downsides of releasable cable ties are that they are more expensive than normal cable ties, and they do not have the same pull strength as the standard nylon cable tie.