Batman’s step mother?
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Hi everyone,
So I get to be Queen of this thread because for the past year I’ve been working the system at www.Alejandra.tv to get my house organized. It is so coming together now.
My house is still weird and wonky, but now that I have appropriate containers and learned how to use a labelmaker, I feel like things are finally getting truly organized.
When I started I thought I’d have things done relatively quickly. Now, it’s like a new hobby. I try to every time I clean do some organizing.
It’s a ton of work; it’s been expensive to buy so many special organizing supplies, but it’s nice to feel that I have made actual progress and not just shoveled crap from one side of the room to the other.
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Seriously, there was a Goth takeoff of “Flylady” called “Batlady.” For those of us more inclined to wade into puddles of absinthe than purple tears Batlady was just the thing.
And where, and where, is the Batlady?
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Recycled three carloads of electronic tackle. Took a load of plywood to the dump that weighed in at 520 pounds. Next up, going to recycle a couple hundred pounds of lead-acid batteries.
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By the power vested in me as thread creator, I hereby pronounce you 
Queen of This Thread!
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Have you tried Naval Jelly?
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In my experience the PB Blaster spray can stuff works much better than WD-40 for actually rusted/locked threads. Whatever’s in it, it seems to penetrate deeply in and work stuff loose.
If you haven’t already, also try the percussion trick: after applying the lubricant, and while twisting the nut with one hand on the vise-grips or wrench, tap it medium-hard on the head with a hammer several times to jar the threads loose. Often that’s enough to get a frozen bolt moving a little bit, and after that you can get it off.
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I’m not sure if this goes in here, but I can’t find a topic for general renovation so…
My Internet is not currently set up optimally, to say the least. My wireless router is on the third floor, with a cable running along the carpet to the office, and the Smart TV in my basement can’t get enough signal to steam video. So, something needs to be done.
I’ve been looking into both Powerline and MoCa, but neither seem to suit my needs. I mean, either will work, but it seems so stupid to pay money for a device that will convert the signal to something that will run on a different kind of wiring where it will experience interference from other signals, convert it back to the original kind of wiring, and then pass the signal onto the destination, rather than run the same sort of wires that usually connect the devices through the walls.
So! I’ve decided to try wiring my house with Cat-6 cable for Ethernet. It doesn’t look like a particularly difficult project (as renovations go), but I’m definitely going to have to plan it all out first.
All right, so step one: Figure out how it’s all going to work. I’m probably going to buy 1000 ft of Cat-6 cable, which should be way more than enough to run 4 cables to each of the outlets I’m planning on using (which should, in turn, be way more jacks than I need). I’ll need a switch (8-port to start off, because I really don’t need more than that yet), jacks, wall plates, and jack covers, a cable tester, and I’ll need to cut at least one hole in the wall.
So, the plan is: four cables to each of the three bedrooms, four to the living room/dining room, and four to the rec room in the basement. Plan is to run these cables through the holes currently being used for the cable TV wires, and mount the jacks in the place the cables are now (since I’m not using those). Hell, I could just figure out a way to have the cable coming out of one of the square network jacks.
Okay, so let’s take stock.
I want the modem/router to be as close as possible to the switch, and I want both of them in the basement. When the DSL guy came by, it looked like the only change he made (other than registering my home on the PSTN) was to wire the jack in my bedroom so that the yellow and black cables were being used, as well as the red and green that a normal phone jack would use.
So, right next to my electrical panel is a phone jack. There are three sets of wires leading to it, as well as a fourth more that looks like it used to lead there.
The disconnected one leads around the corner to another pair of phone jacks; we’ll ignore that for now, as it isn’t hooked up anyway.
Two of the other three lead straight up into the ceiling, probably one to the main panel and one to the rest of the house. I’ll care later which one’s which.
The fourth one is interesting. It runs up to the ceiling, through the wall, into the crawlspace under the staircase, through another wall, and it ends up in my rec room, as a dangling bit of wire. That means three things: First, it can be disconnected from that jack next to the electrical panel without consequence (not that there’d be any consequence if it was hooked up to a jack, since I don’t use my landline for anything other than DSL anyway). Second, there’s a nice, convenient place that I can use to run network cables into the rec room. I just need to turn the little hole into one the right shape and size for a wallplate. And third, those two cables running down and back up into the ceiling are just basically one wire with a jack spliced in.
So, the basement is cool.
Let’s look at the bedrooms, and the living room.
Huh.
After unscrewing each of the wallplates I’m planning to use for my network, all of the coax runs straight up. Which almost certainly means into the attic. This answers the question I was pondering about how the TV cable runs down to the basement while avoiding my living room, but it means that I’m going to have to crawl around in the attic in order to do any more evaluation and planning.
The good news is, I should now just be able to run one big bundle of cable up to the attic, and have it split down to the different jacks from there. The bad news is, it’s going to need to be a pretty big hole to fit 12 Cat-6 cables through it, and I haven’t been able to figure out where those cables come through the ceiling into the basement.
Hmmm. I’ve been thinking of having a roof-mounted antenna installed anyway. Maybe if I’m really nice to the installer (cha-ching), I can get him to run both the Cat-6 and the coax from the antenna down into the basement.
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This will out me as a total geek (Hah! as if you didn’t already know!) but I want to propose wiring all of the outlets you install to a patch-panel at a central location. That gives you a good place to put the switch, etc. and also gives you the ability to shuffle the wiring around any way you may want to in the future. Yes, I did this in my house.
On the other hand, if you’ve never worked with a patch panel, maybe it’s not worth it to you. It stresses my wife out just thinking about the possibility of ever having to deal with it without me.
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Other than tidiness (I can certainly see it being tidier), what’s the advantage of wiring to a patch panel, as opposed to plugging the cables directly into the switch? There must be some advantage to a patch panel, as most of the server rooms I’ve come across have them, but it eludes me.
If I can find a panel, it shouldn’t be too hard to patch, since I’m going to have to patch all of the jacks, anyway.
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Is there anything other than the following (I already own a punch-down tool) that you’ll think I’ll need for this project?
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I would like to reply to this, but I only got about 2 hours sleep last night, and I think I should get more than that before I help you plan a project.
(It looks OK? Maybe? But I’m having trouble figuring out how many outlets and jacks you’re putting in, which is a bad sign. Tomorrow maybe I can multiply 1 digit numbers correctly.)
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I think the final count was 20 jacks (I believe in having a bunch of spare parts on hand).
Thanks!
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Not merely Liked, but Loved! So relaxing to look at.
My main struggle in life is sharing the planet with 6.999999999 billion people who claim to be the same species as me but are suspiciously disorganized.
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I know that this might not seem like a good solution, but what about just calling the cable company and figuring out if you can jack up your router/wifi options. For the cost you are spending on cables and the time, just seems like a more powerful wifi system makes sense.
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Thank you. After a year I am finally getting to the place where my home is more organized than not. I’ve also gotten into the habit of organizing things as I clean. I’ve come to realize that being truly organized is an unreachable goal, but it’s something I can approach more and more.
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Calling the Internet company is not really an option. I get my Internet from one of the discount providers, and that meant buying my Modem/Wi-Fi router up-front. They’re not going to replace it unless I buy a new one.
Although, for much cheaper than going through this whole project, I could buy a bunch of WiFi extenders, or, for just a little cheaper than this project, a pair of Powerline or MoCa adapters and a Wireless router.
But having my house wired with Cat6 is just a much cooler solution. And if I do it right (which I think I have the ability to do), it’s faster, plus much more secure, robust, and reliable than WiFi, and, if I want to extend my WiFi capabilities later, it becomes a matter of basically plugging the new router into power and into the network jack, and configuring the router’s settings.
Plus, it keeps me busy.
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But what’s the cost of a new router?
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I just looked up the modem options available from my provider, and I already have the best one on offer (it’s about two years old now).
As for just a plain WiFi router, they can range from $20 to $500 and up, but I’d probably buy one in the $100 range; the problem at that point is situating it either in a convenient location for maximum penetration of my house by putting it on the main floor, or overlapping the coverage with my existing router by putting one on the upper floor and one in the basement. Since my modem is currently sitting in my bedroom on the upper floor (although I think that I can get it to work in the basement), I’d have to run a cable down to the new, more-conveniently-placed WiFi router anyway. And I already have one ugly cable running from that modem through the halls.
If I don’t want ugly wires running through my house, Powerline or MoCa (diverting the signal through either the house’s electrical or cable TV wires, respectively) will allow me to get the cleaner look I’m going for while connecting the two routers… But then I have to buy a wireless adapter for my desktop, and, even without that expense (which is pretty cheap), with just the cost of the Powerline or MoCa adapters and the new router, I’m starting to climb into the same range of expense that just wiring the whole house properly will cost. And if I do Cat6, then I don’t have to worry about interference on the power lines, or my sensitive information bleeding through the TV cables, or any of that garbage.
It’s overkill… In fact, to be honest, it’s massive overkill (putting in 20 jacks to five rooms when I have a grand total of five devices to plug into them), but it’s just not that much more expensive to have the perfect solution as opposed to having a stopgap solution.
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Sounds like you explored all the options. I have had problems with my intertubes here lately. Only can’t really cable into walls due to this being an old house with lots of funky issues, so I am looking to buy yet another router.
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