Wiring my house
The Finished Project
This weekend I re-wired my house. The house had some old CAT5 cable
that connected up several of the rooms.
Original Wires
Old Wiring
Old Wires
Return air duct
There were a lot of problems with the old wires but here are the main
ones:
#1- The old wiring was quick and dirty. There were no faceplates or
jacks installed, the cables just hung out of the wall. This room used
to be the computer room and all of that was behind a desk so it was
fine. Now this room is the guest bedroom and it's NOT fine.
#2- Ironically the new computer room is not wired into this room so
most of the other rooms are connected via wire but the computer room
is connected using wireless. When one person is streaming video from
TiVo or downloading from the internet, that wireless gateway gets
saturated quickly!
#3- The guest bedroom (former computer room) is the only room with a
live phone jack so the DSL modem is there and the base for the
wireless phones. Not a good place for anything when guests are staying
with you!
#4- The cables for the downstairs got there using the return air vent.
For two or three cables that may be ok but I was going to pull a lot
more than two or three.
The plan was to run 2" flexible conduit from the attic to the basement
furnace room. The only place I could run the conduit was through the
flume space. My house has a rectangle flume that runs from the attic
to the basement and has the furnace vent, return air, and air ducts
running through it. There is plenty of space there for a 2" conduit.
The furnace vent is shielded and doesn't get hotter than what you can
touch so the conduit will be safe there.
Location for 2" flexible conduit
The attic
Conduit location
Originally I had wanted to run the conduit through the walls. You can
see in the picture above a spot where I cleared away the insulation. I
drilled a hole through what I thought was the drywall nailer and it
turned out to not be that! The top of the wall I wanted to use was
under the support structure of the roof and I was not about to drill a
2" hole through that! I ended up cutting a hole in the tin covering
the open ducting space in my house.
My son's bedroom
In order to feed the conduit through two floors, I was going to need
access not only to feed it but to cut another hold in the tin plates
that hold the ducts in place. I chose my son's bedroom because it was
behind a door. My other choice would have been the dining room and I
think my wife would not have liked that. Did I mention that my wife
didn't know I was doing this because she was out of town?
Now that I knew where I was going to run everything I was ready to
start cutting holes.
Finding a stud
Marking and starting the hole
Finished hole
There are two reasons that hole is that large. I needed room to pull
the conduit and I wanted to cut clean between two studs to make the
patch easier. To patch this I cut another 2x4 the width of the hole
and screwed it to the two studs. That created a nice board to mount my
drywall to when I was done. I forgot to take pictures of the 2x4 I
installed but below you can see the patched wall. I also found an old
Pepsi can that was left in there when the house was built.
Hole for conduit
Looking up space to the attic
The conduit was a pain to install. I actually had to do it twice. My
brother stopped by and helped me pull it once and after he left I
found that the conduit had looped in the flume space. Not only would
it be a pain to pull wires through (if even possible), the conduit was
resting against the flume. I didn't like either of those problems so I
pulled it out. With the help of my 7 year old son (he helped quite a
bit on this project) we re-installed the conduit.
Conduit installed from the attic to the basement
The next step was to pull the wire. The conduit came with some very
nice pull string in it but it all fell out the first time we installed
it. I had to use fishtape to get the first wire installed. A very wise
man told me to pull a string with each cable I pull so I would be
ready for the next pull. The first cable was easy to pull.
The first cable pulled from the basement to the new computer room
I also had to locate the wall in the computer room and drill a hole in
the attic to fish the cables down the wall. I only used conduit for
the big pull to the basement. Out of the conduit the cables run in the
attic to the wall and down the wall to the hole I cut out. Because
it's low voltage, I used these nice "mudder frames" rather than
electrical boxes. They are much easier to work with and your cables
don't get all bent up in a box.
Two cable pull
I also ran one coax cable to each room. Pulling the coax was much more
difficult. The cable is heavier and has to come off a spool rather
than out of a box. I pulled 5 CAT5e cables and one coax cable to the
computer room. I have two servers, my computer, and a switch that I
wanted home runs for. The fifth CAT5e cable is for phone.
Finished job in the computer room
The old computer room had the only working phone line in the house. I
ran new CAT5e cable to the source of the phone line and then ran a
home run to the basement for phone. That allowed me to remove the old
phone lines from the walls and replace the old jacks with a modular
system that has phone, Ethernet, and cable all in one jack. I forgot
to get a blank faceplate so I put the old phone jack faceplate over
the old cable hole in the guest bedroom.
Wires pulled and jacks punched down
Finished guest bedroom
Finally the job is done. Eventually I will purchase a wall mount rack
to hold punchdown blocks and a patch board to connect everything. For
now I just put connectors on the cables and ran them to my switch. It
feels good to have my house wired correctly with the ability to pull
more cables any time I need.
The attic
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