I understand this is out of your budget, but hopefully others here who are looking for this information and want to do it better will see this message.....
In my opinion, the correct way to label wires is with a high quality thermal printer designed for standard, heat shrink, and self laminating labels.
The majority of the time I use self laminating labels.
For those who don't know, these labels look like this.
http://images.cableorganizer.com/brady/tls2200/wires-self-la m_lg.jpg
You order them in a couple of different sizes depending on the diameter of the cables being labeled.
After printing you stick on the printed part of the label itself and then the remainder of label wraps back over to protect the label and make it all but immune to nastyness on the cable as the label is stuck to its clean self.
After stuck the labels survive almost anything - including being pulled through hundreds of feet of bend-happy conduit, having tape ripped off the top, and if you are working with direct burial they seem to hold up great underground or in water.
The heat shrink labels are just that - labels printed directly on heat shrink. These are handy for applications where you want to bundle cables together and label the bundles.
The thermal printer not only means there is no ink to run, but it also seems to make getting legible labels in very small font sizes easy.
I personally use Brady TLS-2200 printers, but there is a number of good manufactures of labeling equipment.
I understand that these machines aren't for everyone. But if you do enough work that labeling is a necessity, its one of those things that just makes sense to spend the money and do it right.
Karl P
