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When we purchased our house, the wiring for telephone and coax left something to be desired. Four rooms were wired for phone, and there was also a half-baked phone drop in the garage. The biggest problem with the phone was the poor quality of wire used, and the fact that the line was daisy-chained from one side of the house to the other. So, if you're in the family room, the signal was worse than if you're in the master suite. The television coax was a mixture of RG-59 and RG-6, and there were only three rooms with coax. On top of that, the installers simply drilled a hole (near a wall) in the floor of each room, and shoved the coax up into the room. Less than desirable, in my opinion. So, the whole re-wiring project started with the idea of running new phone lines and adding outlets to the two south bedrooms, where there were no phone drops to begin with. Then we figured, if we're running new phone lines, why not run new coax? That doesn't sound too demanding. The most interesting part of the project was conceived when I was fixing a few computers for friends. We have a broadband internet connection, but only in one bedroom (our "office"). I found myself wondering if we could disperse any of the computers throughout the rest of the house, and still remain connected to our broadband link. The answer came from an unlikely place: the closet. To create a local-area network (LAN), you need a modem (cable or DSL, depending on your provider), a gateway (router) of some sort, and a switch large enough to handle all the computers you have. Well, there was plenty of space in our hall closet to stuff all the hardware on the top shelf. All we had to do was wire in power, phone, coax, and then drop Cat5e lines from that closet to each room we want to have network ports to. When original project was conceived, I thought I could do the wiring myself. I'm a fairly competent person, and I can drill a hole in the right spot. Heck, I even have most of the tools already. Well, after further examination, I decided to call in my good friend Jon (who has more experience than I do with this kind of stuff) to take care of the wiring. In retrospect, that was a wise choice. |
Our new phone, cable and computer network outlets (in almost every room) |
The faceplate, explained |
| The above images show the faceplates that can be found in almost every room in the house. Cat5 was used for all the telephone drops, allowing up to four separate phone lines throughout the house. Quad-shielded RG-6U was used for all coax drops. Cat5E was used for all computer network drops. |
The above image shows the phone patch bay (cream rectangular thing on the left) and coax splitter (on the right) under the house. We added the power outlet just in case we needed a signal amplifier for the coax - it turned out we didn't need one. |
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This image shows the network shelf in our hall closet. You can see (from left to right) a UPS (big black blob), extra patch cables, our cable modem, two extra switches, our Router (bottom right) and two switches in use (two blue boxes stacked on each other at the upper right). What you can't see is a mess of Cat5e patch cables behind the router, going to all the "home runs" throughout the house. |
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