wiring a new house

[pod]

I am hoping to get the wisdom of the crowd on how to best network my new house?

 

I have done a significant amount of cat 5/6 cabling in the school I work down through the years. However, there aren't going to be wires nailed to the walls of my new house as there are in some of my classrooms :-)

 

So what approach would folk recommend, in particular routing cables to each room?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

[laserblazer]

Don't you need to be a qualified sparky nowdays?

 

Edit: I googled and I'm not 100% correct. The rules are outlined here.

 

http://www.diynot.com/wiki/electrics:part_p:diy_electrical_work_and_the_law

Edited May 1, 2010 by laserblazer

[djones]

not for CAT5/6!

[painejake]

Aggghh CAT5 tis a dangerous cable!

 

What's wrong with trunking all over the place anyway!

 

Only thing I can think of without it being a huge jobs is to tack the cable to the top of the skirting board and paint them both the same colour. It's what I did anyway. You hardly notice it if you do a nice neat job :-)

[leco]

Ever thought of not wiring - use home-plug instead? Just a thought.

[FN-GM]

when our house was rewired i had some put in. I just have the network cable going to sockets around the house, they then come to a series of double sockets in the cellar. Then they are connected to a switch.

[featured_spectre]

In my house, they are trunked up and it looks like a nice neat job. I have also painted the trunking to match the Walls for good measure. However initially the cables were tacked to the skirting boards and painted to match and nobody noticed!

[laserblazer]

OMG, note to self. Don't skim!!!

[jedmondson]

A mate of mine has been redoing his house for the past year on the weekends. Last weekend i spent some time laying down on the floors pulling cables though the old electric runs as he is a sparky and had rewired the house. He now has a network point in all bedrooms going to the living room where his media centre is going to be.

[localzuk]

Is there a reason you need wired cabling in the house? Why not install Wireless N AP's?

[synaesthesia]

Definitely don't need to be a sparky for this!

Few ways of doing it - go the whole hog and get it all plumbed in properly. Find somewhere to house your switch and patch panel, basement/attic may well be ideal as long as it's not too damp

You can often do the whole thing with very little choppy choppy - is there a gap between skirting and floor? Very common with floating floor construction (although unlikely your house is) and you can often literally tuck cables in under the skirting board.

Do you have coving on the ceilings? Also a very good way of hiding cables, it's typically only a foam/polystyrene type stuff and easy to chop into without it looking obvious.

Do you have many telephone points? Are they cabled with conduits in the walls? Always enough room for a good 2 or 3 lengths of cat5/6 in with those.

[SimpleSi]

Going around the outside can be the easist/vlaue for money/neatness method -but only works in a semi or fully detached dwelling (but you can go via the loft to drop dow n the other side if in a terraced house

 

regards

 

Simon

[Gatt]

Is Cat 5/6 durable enough to be outside? thought about doing this myself but didnt think the out sheathing was strong enough

[jedmondson]

Is there a reason you need wired cabling in the house? Why not install Wireless N AP's?

 

Becouse i got fedup of having to reboot eveything at home when the wireless messed up for the Nth time for no apparent reasion. We now have cabel in all rooms that need it.

[timbo343]

Is Cat 5/6 durable enough to be outside? thought about doing this myself but didnt think the out sheathing was strong enough

 

Im sure cat6 should be ok for outside use, though i know for a fact you can buy special outside cat6 cable from cablemonkey.co.uk, thats where we got some of ours from for work. Its like a tougher outer sleave that will with stand all the elements.

[FN-GM]

Is there a reason you need wired cabling in the house? Why not install Wireless N AP's?

 

My house is 110 year old. The walls are tick, so the wireless stinks. Also you can get no wireless signal at all in the cellar.

[mjs_mjs]

we have a copper, wifi and ethernet over power network here. and all i can say is thank god for the wired gigabit. semi-detached house, when me bro's room was done up i ran cables up from the study in the wall into the loft then accross and down in other rooms. in the study is the server and printers and mum nd dads workstation, i have the modem in my room untill we redo the study phone line (is a pre ADSL line, and rough), will be moving the garage from eth over power to cat6 as well as the outhose 100ft down the garden. basically eth over power has issues with latency alot of the time and mine dont like surge protectors or 4 gangs with neons in. and even then it's unreliable in my experiance. wifi is wifi and usefull but slow when 5 laptops or more use it (very regular here) gigabit is nice when moving files to and from the storage on the server. if you can run network in the walls do it. if you never use it no worries but it's hard to retofit. and you can always use all of them like we do.

 

in terms of what to do... treat it like a school, find a central place to run all cables to (here it would have been under the stairs with the main phone line and the 'fuse board') run all your cable to there and use that as your 'hub'/router if u have a space like that. use in wall mounted boxes with nice faceplates at both ends. if you can rout cable the same way as TV/radio, phone and preferably not in the same ducts/way as mains cables (tho for a house this shouldn't matter.) if upstairs go up to the loft, if downstairs go into the floor. typically the ceiling of downstairs is difficult to access should a fault occour.

 

hope this helps.

[Guest Guest]

One way i thought of, but would only work if you were redecorating at teh same time, is to remove the skirtingboard and router out a channel for the cable. Abit extreme, but some people cant have any cables showing. Personally i dont care and just bung them under the carpet, but its an option for laminate floors.

 

If its a new home just get up in teh loft and drop wires between teh plasterboard. A heavy chain attached to the cable will help.

[_Adam_]

The problem with running cables in walls is having to know beforehand what the room layout will be, but assuming this is not an issue I would recommend the following:

- In ceiling spaces you can easily run tension cables to tie your network cables to, it keeps them from being stepped on when moving around up there and easier to manage. Also tension cables are extremely cheap.

- Get a conduit wall cutter (either from a sparky or hired) and run your cables in conduit. This allows for very easy adding or changing cables in future. This also depends on your wall type.

- Make sure all data cables are run a minimum of 10cm away from power cables that run in parallel.

- Some skirting have a gap on the backside, if you're replacing skirting this could be an easier way to run cables around a room.

[p858snake]

You can run Cat5e outside (we've had/have it hanging between the house and shed for ages).

 

All of ours is done inside the walls (we only have powerpoints on one wall each room, its on the same one) and they all come out to our hallway cupboard to our switch.

[Andrew_C]

I'd second the suggestion above to look for a central route up and down. Think about where pipes run, and the relationship of the rooms up and down stairs. Is there a cupboard under the airing cupboard with a boiler in it, for example?

 

Cutting chases in plaster/blockwork is hugely messy, even with the right tools. Unless SWMBO is a real stickler avoid this if you can. Dropping down studwork walls is likely to come unstuck if you meet a noggin (you will, someone's law).

This is NOT the way to do it!

Edited May 2, 2010 by Andrew_C

[mjs_mjs]

The problem with running cables in walls is having to know beforehand what the room layout will be, but assuming this is not an issue I would recommend the following

 

Well your computer has to be near a power socket so run network to your sockets... simple. TV's will soon be networked (some are already) so will need a net, phones can run over the cat5/6 cable... you alarm can be networked (thinking 02 jougler) so just run a aerial and car5/6 to every power socket and you can't go wrong. you wont need them in all sockets in the kitchen perhaps.

[p858snake]

Also a hint, Put double of whatever your putting in (even if its just the cabling and only hook up one half) so you have future expandability.

[pod]

Thanks for all the replies!

 

A mention of pipes got me thinking. I am having gas heating put in and I guess the fitters will need to add some sort of boxing to get the pipes upstairs (or downstairs as the boiler is going in the roofspace). I reckon there would be plenty of space alongside the pipes to work some cabling in.

 

Thanks again for shaping a better solution.

 

Chris

[SpuffMonkey]

You can run Cat5e outside (we've had/have it hanging between the house and shed for ages).

 

Yeah - my cable needs to run from the back bedroom to the front room - so it goes up trunking and into the attic, through the attic to the front of the house, out through a gap I found and then down through the brackets that hold the drainpipe and in through a vent into the front room. Its just standard CAT5 and has been in place for 3 or 4 years now - I used a coupler in the attic so it would be easy to replace - but not needed to yet - whole lot cost about £8 off eBay.