House rewire - run cat6

[timbo343]

Just bought a house and currently gutting it and having it rewired. Im in the middle of chasing out the walls for the electric cable to be installed. I was wondering if it might be wise to stick cat6 in the house which would run back to where the phone socket is as this is where the router would be stored.

 

What are peoples opinions on this seeing as we live in a wireless age now and power line adapters are available?

[IrritableTech]

Wire. I've done one link in my house, but the rest is power lines. They don't perform nearly as well.

 

Plan to end up with wireless and wired in as many places as possible. We're geeks after all.

[DPrince]

Definitely wire, although Cat5e would be cheaper and easier to run/terminate. Unless you have something unusual going on in your house, it should suffice.

[elsiegee40]

We use powerline adapters without a problem, but given the opportunity, I would run Cat6 round the house!

[timbo343]

How many points in each room? Its a 3 bed semi with a lounge diner which will be turned into a kitchen diner later.

Would you run all points back to the hall where the phone point is and have a custom made cupboard with router etc in?

[elsiegee40]

It would vary from room to room... and very much depend on the layout. Belt and braces would be one socket next to every mains socket. Simple would be one in each room, enabling you to use a small switch if multiple sockets were needed.

 

From my own home, a socket in each bedroom, two in the study and one next to the television in the living room would be enough. You need to look at your own home and decide

[plexer]

Bt home hub downstairs, meraki wap upstairs and ddwrt router as a client in the man cave gives me internets through whole house.

 

Ben

[featured_spectre]

My house has 4 in the bedroom (xbox, sky, raspi, and pc). Front room has 6 (xbox, sky, TV, raspi, router, Wifi router).

Small room has 4 (not in use yet, but when mrs and I switch rooms with the kids it will be used.) The attic houses the small comms cab with the switch and patch panels.

[MatthewL]

I've run one to every room, only cat 5 but more than enough. If I had planned it better before I plastered I would have run more but there is always next time.

[SteveM555]

Also as +1 for Cat5. Have it installed in the office room at home and I wouldn't go back.

[XiJ]

Did the same in our old house every time we decorated a room. Plan to run some in this new build

 

In old house chased out walls and put in a double socket per room where possible. As easy to run two cables as one.

If I were doing it that way now I would try and position them all in a straight line - so whatever is on a downstairs room could in theory go straight upstairs in the same location. Ran mine back to a central cupboard upstairs. In the new build house there will be a switch / patch panel on the loft.

[michael2k6]

I haven't done it myself yet but I have friends who are contractors and regularly buy and rebuild. They run cat6 to every room now as a matter of course, which is refreshing. They tend to put it next to an aerial point / coax point if there is one and if not, wherever seems most sensible but usually near a power point to cut down on the work.

They always terminate back to a patch panel somewhere quiet such as a closet or the cupboard under the stairs. They tend to put the (or atleast a secondary) phone point in there too and plenty of power.

The last one that they did was a beauty, they had the brief on rebuild right up to furnishing. It ended up with 3 sky boxes in the same cupboard with the eye jobby in each room so that they could be controlled from wherever the TV was. I've never seen it before and I'm not sure how it was done, but it was some sort of multiroom setup whereby the sky boxes are acting in tandem as a big bank of tuners, so essentially each of the two living rooms, the kitchen, and up to 3 of the 5 bedrooms could all be using a different tuner to get a channel, and some of them when not in use could be recording. That bits fairly straight forward, the bit I didn't quite get is that you could pull any recording to any room, and there didn't seem to be any external storage for recording, so it must be pulling from a specific box.

However they did it, it was genius, anyway, and the owner is now using cat6 in the office with a little switch, but has also put a couple of access points in too so that he has good coverage all over the house - which he's used the cat6 points for in those rooms.

[timbo343]

To those who havent stated where the cables run back to, are you able to state please just so i can see what the general location for the termination points are.

 

Some of you have stated that they run back to a cupboard upstairs or into the attic which does make sense.

 

Where i am renting now i have the main router in the hall and powerlined another router which my wireless devices connect to on the landing.

[caffrey]

I put cat5e in to each room too, here's the location (forgive the mess and the dust, I'm currently decorating that room)

[XiJ]

My router would not be in the 'cabinet' of course as it had to go near a phone point. Luckily the one directly above the main phone point was in my bedroom where the computer was - so cat5 available to the rest of my network.

 

If you're chasing the walls but in some trunking as containment. And it gets VERY dusty!

[rich_tech]

I use powerline adapters too here in our home, their "ok" but the speeds are not brilliant (though I did buy a cheaper pair of tp-link ones)

 

I would run Cat6 if I bought a home, ideally back to a patch panel in a stair cupboard, so the noise is quiet.

[HarryMonkey]

Bear in mind that if you're chasing the walls that you cannot run the network and the mains in the same enclosure. If you run the mains in the channel that you've chased in you MUST put the network in trunking or vice versa (This is a requirement of the wiring regs and has nothing to do with interference).

[Garacesh]

First thing I did when I met my landlord (besides saying hello and offering a brew) was ask about wiring the house up. He was happy with it, so now I have certified Cat6 run to the 3 bedrooms. It's great when your mother's husband also works IT. He's always got lots of material I can 'borrow' xD

 

It's definitely worth wiring if you do anything that really gets hampered by latency or jitter. As all three of us are pretty big gamers, wireless just wasn't an issue (that and there's 3 floors, so the wireless wouldn't be so strong on the top floor)

[john]

Agree with the do it phase, I've done a couple of houses, cat6 into a SOHO rack in the garage or loft or under-stairs, got the BT master socket to that location as well so its all in one handy spot and do everything over the cat6. Had 4 by the main TV in the front room (HDMI extenders are usually over a pair of cables) and then 2 elsewhere in that room and then doubles in the bedrooms is the usual spot. Kitchen was a bit different we put 2 behind the bracket for the TV so we could do HDMI to it from a Bluray elsewhere to keep the kitchen clutter free and then one above the kitchen cupboards for a WiFi AP if required as the kitchen was the center of the house.

[3s-gtech]

Cat5e/Cat6 is so versatile for other uses too, if I was wiring a house up fresh I'd definitely put multiple sockets in each room. I'd run it all to a cupboard or cabinet in the roof space.

[Meldrew]

I'd recommend putting cat 5 in too, but don't just put a single cable to each point, even if you want a single patch point in each room, run an additional cable at the same time, even if you leave it curled up in the backbox. Then if you have a cable fault at any point, you always have a spare. The cost to run 2 cables rather than 1 is minute, but trying to rerun a dead cable later will be a nightmare.

 

meldrew

[pete]

++ on Cat5e. Cat6a isn't worth it on the grounds of cost and extra faff for it to pass certification. Not to mention the spline-related cuticle injuries.

 

Mine's a mix of Cat5e where it was easy to do (upstairs, lounge) and powerline/WiFi where it was a faff or would be unsightly (backbone switch > router). The patch panel is in what used to be the airing cupboard before I replaced the boiler.

 

and definitely add extra cables - minimum of 2 drops per location and for things like where you might put the TV (if you rearrange the lounge) a minimum of 4 drops.

 

and pull cords in the conduit.

Edited August 18, 2014 by pete

[Garacesh]

Cat6a isn't worth it on the grounds of cost and extra faff for it to pass certification. Not to mention the spline-related cuticle injuries..

I'm using external-grade Cat6 and I can't say I got any injuries* - how on earth did you end up hurting yourself? lol

 

* Aside from stabbing myself multiple times with a cable terminator, but that's because I'm rubbish at that bit.

[pete]

I'm using external-grade Cat6 and I can't say I got any injuries* - how on earth did you end up hurting yourself? lol

 

* Aside from stabbing myself multiple times with a cable terminator, but that's because I'm rubbish at that bit.

 

We had some 6a with an internal "+" spline and however carefully you trimmed it, the edge of the spline was always razor sharp. Any part of your hand not protected by a callus was subject to puncture wounds from the corners.

[Gardinho]

 

 

I have 16 points, cabled back to my office, plus whatever devices are in there plugs straight in.

 

It sounds like overkill, but when you start counting the devices in a typical IT nerd's house they soon add up.

 

Living room - 8 points (TV, Onkyo AMP, Sky box, Mac Mini for XBMC, Router (Main phone point is down there), PS3 plus a couple spare.

Spare bedrooms have 2 in each (Not terminated yet as we don't use the 2 spare bedrooms). Ours has 3 (TV, Sky box and WD HDTV Live)

Office - 2 NAS drives (one has 2 NICs), Desktop.

 

The pic is a little old, so some cables aren't in there.

 

Whatever you think you need in there, double it. It's so much easier to do it all now then at a later date.

 

If you don't have a dedicated cupboard for your switch, make sure you buy a fan-less one. They're completely silent.

 

I was tempted by Cat6, but opted for Cat5e in the end. I can't see me needing more than GB throughput, plus it was way cheaper and easier to run/terminate. You'd need a pretty decent switch and router to get the full benefits of Cat6, which would be further expense. 1080p 3D HD movies with full DTS MA audio only needing way less than 100mb LAN bandwidth to run faultlessly, and that's the most intensive stuff I'll be doing. With that in mind, Cat5e at 1gb was a no brainer.

 

I know mine is a little ridiculous, but to be honest it was just a really nice project for a true IT geek. I really enjoy having it, and use it way more than I thought I would.

 

My mate is an electrician who put loads of new electric points throughout the house too.

 

Shame about the shoddy ADSL2 broadband!

 

Good luck. I'm almost jealous that it's not me doing it again.

Edited August 18, 2014 by Gardinho