Rewiring House for Cabling - suggestions?

simp

Hi All:-

I've found this forum a great source of info about cabling, and have designed a plan for our new home - which the electrician has just chased - but before they close up the walls I just wanted to run the plan by you, just in case there's anything you think I should add or change... Apologies for going into detail, so if you're of an easily-bored disposition, stop reading now!

It's an 800ft2 two bed D8 terraced house, and we're completely refurbishing. So I'd like to take the opportunity to future proof it. I've asked the electrician to run:-

• two pairs of 2xCat5e + RG6 to each side of the living room chimneybreast#
• 2xCat5e + RG6 to the bedroom
• 2xCat5e + RG6 to the kitchen
• 2xCat5e + 2xRG6 to the office / spare room*

# the extra pair of cables is to allow for moving the entertainment hub, should the need arise
* the extra RG6 is for a convenient TV location if the room became a full-time bedroom

Our hub is in a cabinet beside the front door. The telephone and NTL cable run into this point. There will be a 16 way patcher there for networking. I anticipate splitting out the telephone connection into phone/dsl - running the dsl into a dsl modem, thence to a combi wireless / wired router, and thence to the patch panel and feeding it out to one each of pairs of Cat5e terminations. The phone will be fed into the patcher and run via 5 pairs of Cat5e to the other Cat5e terminations. The cable comes in here and will feed out to the 5 cable points - and is located for perhaps in future bridging to the cat5e patching...

The alarm system is a seperate set-up. Running to all the windows, back to a panel in the understairs and out to a keypad beside the front door. My brother-in-law, who's an alarm technician and will be finishing off the alarm for us, advises to ask him to leave three wires in the attic, for a motion sensor, a landing smoke detector, and an outside alarm. He also advises running a phone line to the alarm panel-understairs, so that, for example, we could be texted when the alarm went off, which I think quite great. The house is too small to warrant CCTV, hence the RG6.

So - do you think this set-up adequate? Our usage pattern is as follows:-

- I work from home, exclusively using the internet.
- My gf does a lot of research from home, and currently we have a comical 10m cable fed out of a spare network card in my mac - not good!
- Only one telephone line at present - and I still refuse to get a fax - despite the fact that builders don't do email...
- We watch little TV, but we want to do a good job, and in case we resell, think of what TV-watchers
- And in case we rent it out we want to think of tenants - and the added advantage of being able to play 4-room networked doom... (not that we want students in the place or anything...)

Do you think that this would cover us? The slabbing starts Tuesday, so if anyone has any reason why this plan should not go ahead let them state their reservations now...

Finally, is there anything that I should double-check with the sparks to make sure that he's done the cabling appropriately? It seems like he's made sure that the electrics are kept at a distance, but I can't see how he's chased the corners. Would there be a couple of questions - and answers to expect - that you could suggest I'd ask him, then that'd be great.

Ultimately, we (or rather I) have gone over-budget with the wiring, so the sparks suggested that I could do the cable face-plates and patching myself to reduce the outlay. Is this advisable as a newbie DIY job? He's labeled all the cables well, and I am used to using networks, if not quite installing them...

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for your suggestions...

(P.S. If you read this far, then you're a nerd. But I'm a nerd too, so I have utmost respect for you nonetheless)

crosstownk

Sounds like a top notch plan to me!! I got my house rewired 6 months ago and was contemplating Cat5 but decided against it as all my machines are wireless. Wireless is certainly the way of the future so be sure all the time and money isn't going to end up a white elephant.

melekalikimaka

i just wired my house with cat 5e too, its easy, i set up the router in my attic and had everything running down from there, popped a cable into every room, the hardest part is terminating them

simp

Thanks for your comments. I anticipate using wireless, but just want to future-proof. Wireless is great for broadband, but wired will still, I think, be used for ages for other stuff, and cat5e can be used for phones, video, cctv, audio, xboxes etc. Also, cat5e is still more robust and secure than wireless - although this is likely to change...

Anyhow, as mentioned, the walls are being filled in tomorrow - so if anyone else has any other ideas, I'd be glad of them soon!

Cheers,

simp.

patrido

simp wrote:

Thanks for your comments. I anticipate using wireless, but just want to future-proof. Wireless is great for broadband, but wired will still, I think, be used for ages for other stuff, and cat5e can be used for phones, video, cctv, audio, xboxes etc. Also, cat5e is still more robust and secure than wireless - although this is likely to change...

wireless is fine for web surfing, but is hopelessly inadequate for copying large amounts of data. it's also inadequate in concrete walled houses and in new houses with all the foil on the insulation. try copying the latest episode of lost from the media centre pc to the laptop (for watching during a quiet moment at work ) on a wireless connection...

wireless is also using a crowded (and in the future overcrowded) range of frequencies.

in my opinion, wired will always be easier to secure than wireless. with wired, an intruder has to physically get into your house and plug into the wired network before overcoming any encryption you decide to put in place. with wireless the intruder only has to sit in a car outside.

anyone building or rewiring would do well to *plan* on never using wireless (apart maybe from surfing from a hammock).

simp wrote:

Anyhow, as mentioned, the walls are being filled in tomorrow - so if anyone else has any other ideas, I'd be glad of them soon!

Cheers,

simp.

if you want to be future proof, put in cat 6 (or 7 if you can get it). and even if you don't i would at least double the number of cables at each point. it's relatively cheap and easy to do it now. wait till you have rooms filled with network dvd/divx players, telephones/voip phones, streamed audio/video, etc.

it's not that long ago since one or two single :eek: electrical sockets were considered adequate.

simp

Thanks for that Patrido.

Yes, I have heard people advise against relying too much on wireless for a home network.

I think that cat5e should be fine for the forseeable future - although opinions vary! I'm taking the advice of tomsnetworking.com - so on my own head be it if I can't access broadband at terabyte speeds in years to come

I do think that 2 cables should be enough for each room, but I might ask the sparks to run more. I could always put a router in if I wanted to split the network more at certain points, couldn't I?

Finally, do you think that the patching and termination is a straightforward enough DIY job for an enthusiastic amateur with an alarm-technician friend helping him?

Cheers.

patrido

you can get gigabit over cat 5e, and it should be a good few years before that feels slow

simp wrote:

I do think that 2 cables should be enough for each room, but I might ask the sparks to run more. I could always put a router in if I wanted to split the network more at certain points, couldn't I?

yes you certainly could in a place like the living room where it could hide among all the other equipment. though you'd be sharing the bandwidth too. and a few extra cables will probably cost less than a router (esp a gigabit one).

simp wrote:

Finally, do you think that the patching and termination is a straightforward enough DIY job for an enthusiastic amateur with an alarm-technician friend helping him?

Cheers.

yes you should be fine. make sure the spark leaves some excess cable at both ends and elsewhere (like in the ceiling void above the wall points) so that if you make a mistake, you can cut it off, pull a little more through and start again. who said it's better to be looking at it than looking for it?

tribesman

I would put at least 2x RG6 (preferrably 3) to each side of the chimney breast in the living room. One would be the feed for the satellite receiver, another would be a separate feed from a terrestrial aerial. The channels available on the aerial may also be available on satellite but having a separate feed allows you to watch one channel from the aerial and record a different channel from the satellite, or vice versa.

The third cable would bring the output of your satellite receiver and/or VCR/DVD player back up to the loft and in to a distribution amplifier where it could be sent to the other rooms in the house. This would allow you to watch whatever satellite channel is selected in the living room anywhere in the house. You could also watch a DVD or VCR.

Maybe the living room is not the most appropriate place for this set-up for you but the same applies wherever you would have your sat receiver, vcr etc.

simp

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll see how much cable we can get away with running at this stage!

One final question - what about wiring for surround sound? Personally, I don't like the idea of a centralised "channel" of audio, or anything else, in a network. I'd rather have everything distributed, and do multi-room audio on a room-by-room basis with a set of Sonos boxes talking to a central music server (as soon as they become affordable!) The idea of the stereo broadcasting a channel to all the rooms seems a bit old-fashioned to me - especially in such a small house... Is this something we should consider, do you think? Could we even use the spare cat5e pair from the telephone cabling for audio? Your thoughts would be appreciated.

patrido

by running loads of cat 5 back to a patch panel, you keep all your options open.

ideally you'll run multi room audio over your ip network as per sonos, etc.

but you could send audio over cat 5 directly to speakers (within limits), or use a balun with phono (or svideo/scart) interconnects to send audio (and/or video) over cat5.

simp

Thanks for the clarification, Patrido.

I'm still slightly confused about the RG6 requirements. If we only run a single set of cables to each point, does this preclude us from having sky+ and the like? Can we use some sort of distribution box like a loftbox to upgrade if needs be?

patrido

do you mean a single cable? it's still possible... you can have the sky box beside the loft box at the main distribution point.

then you need to send IR back to the sky box so install a tvlink in the living room (actually put one in any room you want to use the sky remote for changing channels).

most people still put the sky in the living room beside the main tv. in this case you want a feed from the sky dish (via a coax patch panel if you're using one) into the living room for feeding the sky box. then the output from the sky dish goes back up to the loftbox for distribution to all the tv points rooms.

it's always better to put at least two cables everywhere though. it's the same amount of chasing, and the same amount of conduit. it will never be as cheap or easy to put it as it is now.

simp

I was just on site with the electrician and he suggested just that set-up in case one wanted satellite sky+ or whatever : loftbox & sky box at hub, feeding to the standard coax outputs with tvlinks installed.

Also, I have a confession to make - I hate television - so I'll barely be using the RG6 at all. I'm only checking all this out so that in future some tv-zombie might find the set-up use-able. So I'm not going to ask for an extra RG6 feed to each location - and on my own head be it... It's a small house and I think there's just about enough in the walls.

The only modification to the set-up I've made is for two extra Cat5e points in the understairs. One for my network printer, and the other for a USB HD networked via a Linksys NSLU2 to be a media server and network back-up...

The walls get filled in tomorrow. I think I've thought of everything! Thanks for your useful suggestions!