Home cabling Refit - where to buy etc

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PeterBC

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#581893 15-Feb-2012 15:17

Thanks for the reply.

What is "decent separation" to avoid interference? Some of my lines are 20m long and run generally parallel to power wire. Is 50mm enough?

I wasn't worried about interference at the crossover points but is sheath to sheath contact acceptable for the wiring safety regs? If not, will I need to make a little bridge or have a short run of conduit?

To paraphrase: Why would you want two gigabit outlets in one room? I'm not too worried about cable cost, although I will have used about 140m as it is, but I'm not convinced that two goes as easily as one. You should see the maze of joists, bearers and nogs I'm negotiating, space is at a premium. And that's just the under-floor, the ceiling is %^&$. I have enough work redo-ing the floors, the kitchen, laundry and bathroom. I have just finished the added garage and the plumbing replacement and am not looking for unnecessary extra work before I move in

. I don't see the point of laying cable for the sake of it. Unless you decode your HDTV signal at some stupid point, you can stream HD video over 10/100 just fine. Fancier video than that doesn't remotely tempt me. I'm wiring for myself, not the hereafter.

I am a bit fussy about outlet placement. I and certainly my wife find grovelling behind furniture for outlets just naff. Probably it upsets us more than you because of our advancing years.

However I do want a good job on the 10/100 - phones. Any technical comments, I am no expert

cyril7

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#581899 15-Feb-2012 15:28

Hi Peter, if you do decide to go with 1 cable to each flush box then thats fine, however I recommend that you correctly wire it to a single fully wired cat5e socket, then if you decide that at a particular socket you want both phone and data (al beit only 10/100Mb/s) then simply use a line splitter at each end of the circuit to split out the individual phone/data circuits. This way you preserve the full potential of GigE if you should want it and can change outlet use at will without the intervention of tools.

In reality you only have phones in use in a few locations, especially if you are using DECT cordless etc, therefore for the few that need both services then the above mentioned approach is cleaner.

http://www.cablesdirect.co.nz/catalog/entry?entry=334

Cyril

PeterBC

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#581944 15-Feb-2012 16:49

Hi Cyril,

Thanks for the reply.

I would really like to avoid the use of ugly external splitters. As I already have the phone circuits filtered, what do they do apart from avoiding the need for an extra jack in the flush box? At the flush box the connection to both jacks will be normal i.e. all pairs connected in the correct places. The only "oddity" is that the jacks share one cable. I intend that the cable be used to supply one Ethernet device and/or a phone device, or two phone devices at once, but never two Ethernet devices. I can't see why I would ever want more at one location. It is my understanding that being connected to pairs that are unused would hurt neither an Ethernet nor a phone device, Is that right? So my original concern was that sharing the cable in this way might possibly introduce some other issue, not that I can see how, but I wanted to see what the experts thought.

At the patch panel, I was also hoping to connect all pairs normally. That will depend on whether I can jumper the blue/white pins together at the patch panel in addition to attaching the blue/whites from the cables in the standard way. if that is not practicable, I will have to star the blue/white pairs external to the panel, not beautiful but it should still work.

I don't ever see the need to go Gigabyte. If someone else wants to do it, removing the jumper and possibly;y punching down the blue/whites doesn't seem too onerous surely. Especially in the context of replacing virtually everything else in the system.

My other main concerns are interference from parallel runs of power and data/phone and electrical safety.

How far apart do the power and cat5e need to be to be apart over a 20m run? Is the 50mm required by the safety regulations enough?

Where power and data cross (At right angles) do I need 50mm or a hard separation?

At closely spaced data and power outlets, where the stud placement is unsuitable, is it acceptable to box around the data outlet?

chevrolux

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#582084 15-Feb-2012 22:01

You really don't need to stress out too much about separation. The people who invented category 'x' cabling were pretty on to it and the twists pretty much eliminate crosstalk from other cables. I have only ever seen one instance of noise induction killing a data circuit and that was in a dairy factory where some very clever person ran a cat5e through the same hole as a 400V 3-phase un-armoured power cable. There just isnt that sort of power present in the home situation. In general we try not to lay a data cable straight on top of power but if it is just crossing over one power cable I don't bother with bits of wood etc to create separation. If it is passing over a big bundle I might scrounge up a small piece of wood to make a bit of a bridge. It is mainly an 'if you can be bothered' factor. Running parallel to a power cable want be a problem; with at least 50-100mm separation you will be fine. No need to box around the data outlet, just run the cable in to the wall space. Line the wall and then cut out a hole, fish out the cable and use a wally box (go and ask your electrical wholesaler for some). They lock on to the jib and you can put them wherever you want on the wall. No wood required.

Now the cable numbers situation...
I see your point in terms of 100Mb is all you need to do what you want to do. I guess the problem I have with setting the cabling up like this is because I have been in the situation where a building has been wired like this and the next person comes along and wants a whole bunch of stuff put in so I have to spend days replacing stuff. But I see your point, this is for you and will let you do what you want so i guess I can't really argue that. I do say it all the time, running two is just as easy as running one, but I have to remember not everyone has multiple boxes of cable at disposable. If you have at least two boxes of cable there is no reason for running only one cable to each outlet. But when you have one box doing two crawls to each outlet would be a pain in the ass.

Skolink

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#582097 15-Feb-2012 22:27

PeterBC: You should see the maze of joists, bearers and nogs I'm negotiating, space is at a premium. And that's just the under-floor, the ceiling is %^&$.

If I may chip in, this is exactly the reason you want to take a second cable to each location. When I wired our house (1920's) I pulled 4x cat5e and 2x coax to each location, because I didn't ever want to do it again! I hated grovelling around in the ceiling getting covered in soot and batts. Unfortunately 4 outlets behind the TV turned out to be not quite enough.

Jaxson

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#582099 15-Feb-2012 22:30

chevrolux: There just isnt that sort of power present in the home situation.

That's a pretty key point right there. Retailers love to sell $250 1.5m hdmi cables, where the difference is in the shielding. Given you're in a home, and not an industrial plant room with VSD's and motors etc, once you've sufficiently shielded your AV signal, there's practically nothing to be gained by shielding it some more.

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richms

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#582137 16-Feb-2012 00:58

Only benifit I have seen that a non dirt cheap HDMI cable solved was the radiation out of the cable hammering the analog TV1 reception that was pretty bad to start off with.

I have basically all the cat5es in the garage running around the top of the walls along side the power circuit (there was nowhere else to put them - 70mm apart from bundle to the 2.5mm power cable) and have seen no signs of any loss or latency with it. Dont stress about it

Richard rich.ms

PeterBC

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#582193 16-Feb-2012 09:44

Thank you all for your replies. I was starting to freak out.

Not only do i not have two cable boxes, I am not using even one, 305m is much too much for me. And yes, I did get the most horrendous snarl that I had to clear whilst lying on my back in the dirt. I am improvising a spinning jenny, having learnt a painful lesson. Who would have thought that that rusty old wheelbarrow I found at the back of the section and an old plastic cable drum would ever be useful!

I am fascinated at the thought that 4 outlets behind the TV could ever be insufficient. Do you have a thread that describes your setup? My Idea was to centralise everything in the data cupboard and just pipe the currently-watched transmission stream to the TV. Decoding would be done at the TV, either with a network-aware TV or with an ordinary digital TV and something like the WDTV video server beside the TV. That would surely only require one cable? Mind you, at the moment there's very little worth watching on TV anyway, so I am not giving it much priority.

cyril7

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#582197 16-Feb-2012 09:47

Hi, I would strongly recommend that any main AV location has a minimum of 3 RG6 and 2 or 3 cat5e runs, and if the TV is on the wall above this the I would run 1x RG6 and 1x cat5e to that high wall location also.

Cheers
Cyril

RunningMan

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#582310 16-Feb-2012 12:41

PeterBC: I am fascinated at the thought that 4 outlets behind the TV could ever be insufficient.

1) TV
2) Blu Ray player
3) HDD Sat or Terrestrial recorder
4) Media Device like Apple TV
5) HTPC

Not difficult to get to use up outlets very quickly...

richms

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#582453 16-Feb-2012 16:48

Cheap hdmi over cat6 uses 2 cables. So 2 to the tv and 2 from any local source back to a matrix switch or amp and.you are done with only 4

Richard rich.ms

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Zeon

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#582462 16-Feb-2012 17:01

Even if you only put in a single socket to begin with, take at least 1 other cable and just leave it in the wall. You never know when you might need it and the cost of the cable is so low compared to the amount of effort of doing it again - even in 5 years time that its easily worth it...

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PeterBC

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#582537 16-Feb-2012 20:28

OK I'll run a second cable to the TV. That's the easiest run in the house and is only 3m anyway. However, I am still of the opinion that the way to go is to have the right combination of devices at each end of the cables, rather than run multitudes of cable. Ideally, the the inputs all go into your server cupboard and everything goes on the Lan from there on. An HDTV transmission stream will easily go over 10/100 Ethernet and there should never be a need to send decoded video more than a metre or so. I know that some devices don't work that way yet, but it must happen, despite the DRM horse droppings. I'm not that into TV anyway, I can wait for the manufacturers to see sense. We are already getting LAN connectable TVs for instance.

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