Setting up wired network at home

i had to do this a few months ago.

The mistake I made was running it diagonally under carpet. The cable will wear out after a while of people walking over it!!

Also, if putting it under floorboards where it wont be easily accessed in future it might be an idea to protect it in a pipe or something. Mice and such just love chewing these wires!!

macgrl said:

Great advice, thank you.

what equipment did you use to set it all up?

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To do it right, it's by no means an easy task.

I did this very thing when my house was being built, I have probably about 1mile of CAT6 running through my walls at my house. (It's a big house, and I ran a lot of cable)

Generally you want to run it from the attic or basement (if you have either one), running CAT6 in PVC pipe, or thin galvanized steel tube, (this will help with weathering and rodent protection )

First, you need to figure how much cable you will need, it's best to buy 1000ft CAT6 cable, which will give you plenty of room to make the pulls right, and extra incase you mess up a few times.

You need some Wall Plates 2 or 4 hole for Keystone jacks.

You also need CAT6 Keystone Punchdown Jacks. Or if you don't want to buy a punch down tool, you can get the CAT6 Toolless Keystone Jacks.

You also need CAT6 Plugs

You will also need a set of Plug Crimps, which give you the ability to make the cables

To get fancy, and make it look nice on the cable you would make to connect from the wall to the device, there are RJ-45 colored relief boots.

Last but not least, you need to know how to make the cables, and the correct wiring diagram. It goes like this
From left to right.
white-orange | orange | white-green | blue | white-blue | green | white-brown | brown

If you have any questions, please let me know

From the construction side, by a fish tape that electricians use. It should only cost ~$30, make sure you buy one long enough to do your longest run. The fish tape is easy to push through walls or between joists. Start at one end of your proposed path and push the fish through to the other end. Tape the cable on (do a good job as nothing sucks more than it falling off halfway), then pull the fish back out dragging the cable with it.

Unless you want to make a giant mess, conduit is not a viable option for you. Just use bare wire, but as people already said, put it in an area where it won't be trampled. If mice ever eat the wire, tape the new one to the old one and then pull the old one out.

Make sure you terminate the wires correctly, the order of the wires is really important. I have wired cables before where all the the connections were correct (Pin 1 to 1, 2 to 2, etc), but the colors were mixed up. The damn things were barely able to connect. I fixed the color order and they worked at gigabit speeds.

You should read some articles on structured wiring. Here is a good one. Not 100% current, but it is very, very good.

http://www.swhowto.com/

It pretty much covers everything. I've not gone as far as the article above, I've just run a few Cat-5e wires in my house, but I aspire to something more substantial if I can find a run from attic to basement. Good luck!