Whole house networking - anyone run their own cable?

I'm seriously considering running Cat5e all throughout my house soon, as a project to lay groundwork for future improvements (home server, firewall, proxy server). I have 1000' of cable, all the tools, and a decent idea of how I plan to route the cable and where to put all my wall plates. I'm even thinking of diagramming everything out in Visio over a copy of the floor plan of the house. Everything will terminate out to a patch panel with space to add a small rack. Still not sure where to put that, but I could either go to a closet in a bedroom which functions as my "office" or a laundry room. Has anyone ever done this? What advice can you offer? What else should I plan for?

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Everyone

I am wiring my basement up as I finish it, but for right now everything on the 1st and 2nd floor is connected via wireless.

This is one of those things I think is easier to do either A. when building a new home, or B. when remodeling your existing home.

Do you have a basement? If you do, that spot under the stairs is probably a good place for a patch panel and small rack.

Be careful with the bedroom office, as you may find yourself needing it as an actual bedroom later. My house has 4 bedrooms, when we moved in, I only had 2 kids, so the 4th bedroom was my office. Then we had a 3rd, so I had to move EVERYTHING into the basement (which is completely unfinished) where I am still trying to build myself an office.

zenhound

I'd love to do that. I can only imagine how difficult it would be in my house though. I can see it working in some houses, but mine is from 1897, so it's all crazy and patchwork to begin with. It's all wireless for me.

I did have a friend who did it on the east coast, but he had a fairly modern house. He was thrilled having outlets in all rooms, although this was back when wireless was a lot slower than it is now, not sure if he'd do it again.

veritas_libertas

I'm in the process of doing that right now. The drilling has begun, and I'm going to get my security cameras going at the same time. Might as well do it all at once. Yes, it can be a bit of a pain.

pitviper

I've done some residential wiring, both new construction and existing structures, for friends family and myself. If you take your time it's generally not too bad -=AS LONG AS=- you're not dealing with plaster walls!

This thing is worth its weight in gold for doing nice straight cut-outs:

veritas_libertas

pitviper wrote: »

This thing is worth its weight in gold for doing nice straight cut-outs:

Very nice. They have some other cool products on their website: Low Voltage Mounting Plates and Templates from Mike Sandman Enterprises, Inc.

MAC_Addy

I've wired my house. It's a single-story house with an attic. I ran the cables down the walls and guessed where I needed to drill. I still have wireless running for our cell phones and her iMac.

Mrkali

I've been contemplating wiring our home as well. Single story, 3 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, with everything running to a coat closet off the hall. The wife is on board.

I've never been in our attic before though.. I might check it out before I make a final decision.

exampasser

I would wire my home but since my house is on a slab instead of a foundation I can't do floor jacks. Having to go through the attic and through walls wouldn't be fun.

Priston

Depends on the house and the locations of your drops. Some are really easy, others are near impossible.

jdancer

Another option is to use Powerline Ethernet adapters.

I use the POWERLINE AV 200 series from Netgear.

Zero problems.

Claymoore

The best advice I can give is that if you are going to pull 1 cable, you might as well pull 10 - it's the same amount of work.

A roommate and I lived in a house that was not wired for cable TV, so when I wired it for satellite, I pulled Cat5 and Cat3 everywhere as well. We had a 6 port wall plate in the living room with 1 cable, 3 satellite, 1 phone, and 1 ethernet jack. We had an entertainment center with 3 TVs and satellite boxes with NFL Sunday Ticket. We would split the screen on the 51" HD to watch a satellite and local game while having 2 other football games going on the 20" TVs at the top of the rack. The room had 5 individual recliners - no couch. Sometimes I miss being single...

Plantwiz

Running cable is no problem. I've run mine and others. Know your local codes though! Most of the time, I have not seen any concerns with CAT however, I have a few friends who (are electricians) comment that some areas do have specific standards to maintain...so just know what you are working with.

Pick up a fish tape. In my younger days I would chance running wire through blind areas and on occassion rig up some creative ways to get the line through, but finally after a couple decades I simply broke down and purchased a fish tape. Have yet to use it, but it can save you a bunch. There is also a magnetic device you can use and fish the line through walls, ceilings or other blind areas with a magnet...pretty slick. But then again, I've managed all these years.

There are other options:
- wireless (but what fun is this when you can run a wire?)
- wall tape (I think it is listed as FlatWire. It is paintable and mounts easily. Stick it to the wall, paint and you are all set).
- Run along the baseboards, there are moldings that can receive a small wire or simply notch out a grove with a router and this works out pretty clean too.

However, if your skill at finish carpentry is limited, running wire (if things don't go as planned) may not seem as fun. I'm used to this sort of work, and I'm also pretty decent at avoiding making a problem larger so I don't need to use those carpetry skills.

Plan first, try second...bring a friend on it (makes the whole process WAY more interesting

).

Good luck!

Claymoore

Plantwiz wrote: »

Pick up a fish tape. In my younger days I would chance running wire through blind areas and on occassion rig up some creative ways to get the line through, but finally after a couple decades I simply broke down and purchased a fish tape. Have yet to use it, but it can save you a bunch. There is also a magnetic device you can use and fish the line through walls, ceilings or other blind areas with a magnet...pretty slick. But then again, I've managed all these years.

Push sticks or fish sticks are also great. A few links of chain heavy enough to fall through insulation - with or without a magnet on the wall to help them - tied to some twine makes it easy to pull a bundle of wires later. You can also leave a bit of twine tied in the attic at that run in case you need to pull more wires down that path in the future.

Fish Stix, Push Pull Rods, Telescoping Poles

Priston

Claymoore wrote: »

A roommate and I lived in a house that was not wired for cable TV, so when I wired it for satellite, I pulled Cat5 and Cat3 everywhere as well. We had a 6 port wall plate in the living room with 1 cable, 3 satellite, 1 phone, and 1 ethernet jack.

If you run 2 cat5e cables instead of 1 cat5e and 1 cat3, you can use the 2nd cat5e as either voice or data (depending how you connect everything) For when you decide to get voip in the house

tpatt100

jdancer wrote: »

Another option is to use Powerline Ethernet adapters.

I use the POWERLINE AV 200 series from Netgear.

Zero problems.

Yeah I use powerline adapters to go from the computer room upstairs where the modem/router is down to my living room where my PS3, Wii, Xbox, Apple TV is. I have a switch behind the entertainment center which is where I plug the adapter into and all the devices to that. Now I kind of find myself wanting to figure something else out because my iPad lags for multimedia when trying to use Airplay because it uses wifi to go up and then powerline back down to the apple TV.

WafflesAndRootbeer

jdancer wrote: »

Another option is to use Powerline Ethernet adapters.

I use the POWERLINE AV 200 series from Netgear.

Zero problems.

This. I wired my homes with CAT6 back when nobody was doing it. Then the cables degraded after several years. Replaced the whole setup with Powerline Ethernet and haven't looked back. Powerline Ethernet adapters can now be had for 1/2 the price of what I paid for mine a while back
and it's well worth the money.

odysseyelite

I rent, but have helped friends do this in their homes. In my apartments, condo's etc I had to always run a cable along the wall until I start using routers running WDS over wireless N. It's cheap and its fast. I have the main router in the office, then two wds routers in the living room and bedroom to stream movies including blue ray rips.

I have enough coverage to plug in using a cable if needed for devices. I connect regular wireless devices to the 2.4 wireless N network and anything that is streaming large amounts of data over the wireless 5Ghz network. All for about 120 bucks.

Cpl.Klinger

Thanks for the good info! I'm on a slab, so I'd have to go through the attic, but I know what's inside the walls and is above the ceiling from taking pictures during the build of the house. I'm going to have to take pictures so I can put up a build thread when I'm done.

Everyone

I thought about the power line thing, but you can't plug them into surge protectors, and surge protectors are occupying all the outlets where I need them.

I am at the point where I need to either A. replace my wireless router, or B. run Ethernet to at least 1 room in the house.

My aging wireless router had 1% packet loss over 1575 packets sent, average latency was 413ms, and maximum hit 3757ms. $:\$ That was a test with the device sitting 4 feet away from the router to rule out signal strength issues. The wired gigabit part of the router still works great, less than 1ms ping all day long with no packet loss. Everything I have hooked up wired to it right now is on Cat 7.

dustinmurphy

+1 on the fish sticks. I have fish tape.... and it works, but sticks work SO MUCH BETTER...

Also +1 on running Cat 5e/6 instead of Cat 3...

My house was pre-wired with Cat 5e. I've had to add a few drops.... but all my stuff goes to a structured wiring box in the laundry room. I had planned on putting it all in a rack, but couldn't give up the space for it.

I just have a Linksys router in there.

I like it 'cause I can have gig e throughout the house.

There was only 1 drop upstairs, and because of the space restraints... I was unable to run more drops, so I just ran a flat cable from that drop to a different drop under the carpet.

blargoe

I have a nice crawl space under my house, so I have run some cat5 to my living room for my media player and to my den for the Wii and a computer.

WafflesAndRootbeer

Everyone wrote: »

I thought about the power line thing, but you can't plug them into surge protectors, and surge protectors are occupying all the outlets where I need them.

Not a problem. They have adapters with built-in outlets and there are even high-end ones with surge protection built-in.

pitviper

I use the powerline Ethernet adapters that I pulled out of an office to simulate packet loss in my lab