House wired for extra phone sockets. How to connect?

ElBarco

Before we purchased our house we asked the builders to provide a number of extra phone sockets (for the internet upstairs, sky box in living room, etc). They happily complied and left a number of blanking plates at the requested locations. Inside these blanking plates is some grey clad, 4 core wires.

I have been instructed (my wife is getting fed up of long cables running around the place) to get this sorted out. Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction for connecting this wire on to the phone system? An online guide would be lovely, I'm not too sure where to start - I don't want to go messing with the Eircom master connection until I'm reasonably sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

Thanks to anyone who might be able to help!

garyh3

Hi

Eircom end just strip back the wires and connect any two or the 4 wires (ususally blue and blue/white to connection L1 and L2 )

Go to the socket end and connect the same wire to the middle connections
(Mine connects to the red and green.)

hope this helps

Garyh3

Tenshot

ElBarco wrote:

Inside these blanking plates is some grey clad, 4 core wires.

This sounds like CAT5/CAT5E cable; are the "4 cores" orange, green, blue and brown? If so, you'll find their are actually 8 wires in 4 pairs, and the cable can support up to four phone lines (or two phones and one Ethernet connection).

If it's actually only four wires in total, they'll be in two pairs: probably blue/blue-white and orange/orange-white.

Is it obvious where the other ends of the cables come out? Probably in the attic, or under the stairs. If you're lucky, the electrician will have labelled them for you, otherwise you'll need to figure out by trial and error which cable is which.

You'll need a small junction box to connect into the original phone line coming into the house. Since you already have a master socket somewhere, you don't need to do anything special to install the other sockets - a standard telephone socket for a single-gang wallbox will do the trick nicely (available from any electrical wholesalers).

Traditionally, you use the blue/blue-white pair of wires for the first phoneline in the house, and leave the other pairs unconnected. You can just wire the blue/bluewhite of each cable into the junction box, where all the wires gather together in the attic. Then in each socket, remove the blanking plate and fit a standard RJ11 socket. There will be terminals inside labelled L1/L2 or coloured Red and Green; connect the Blue/Blue-white wires to these terminals. (Obviously, you'll need to strip off the plastic to expose the copper in the wire before connecting them!)

Nothing too terrible will happen if you short out the telephone line in the process of connecting everything up; modern exchanges expect this to happen from time to time and compensate for it. You also won't get a shock from the phone line if you happen to touch it, UNLESS someone decides to ring you at the time, in which case you might get a bit of a jolt (ringing voltage is around 50 volts DC). It won't kill you, but you'll remember it. Unlikely to happen though, so I wouldn't worry about it.

If you're feeling a bit more ambitious, you could install a "Network + Phone" socket at each blanking plate. This would give you a network connection on one side and phone socket on the other. For this, you'd go to your electrical wholesaler and get a pair of "CAT5E/RJ45 sockets" in a single-gang faceplate. Connect the orange & green pairs to the left (network) socket and the blue pair to the right (phone) socket. You need a Krone punchdown tool to this correctly (also available from your wholesaler). At the far end, where all the cables come out, you could either install more sockets, or get a small patch panel. Then you install a network switch, along with your broadband router, and you have instant Internet access at any point in the house.

If you have all the bits, it shouldn't take you more than an hour to get everything organised for a basic phone setup. Connecting the network ports is a bit more involved if you're doing it for the first time. Of course, you can always go back and do that later if you feel so inclined.

ElBarco

Tenshot/Garyh3, thanks for the advice. I'm going to have a crack at it this evening. Tenshot, it never even occured to me it would be CAT5 cable - now I regret spending that money on wireless networking kit. I think I'll just stick with the phone extensions for the moment - I was never any good at punching down cables.

Thanks again!