How to Run Ethernet Cables in a Finished House??

[ImageStealer]

One other method that hasn't been mentioned here is using the heating/cooling duct-work to route your cables.

You can purchase plenum rated CAT6 cables, and then run them through the plenum system by using small holes and fishing them up to the registers.

I realise placement might not be ideal, but once into the room(s) required they can be run along baseboards as required.

This method assumes that you have central forced air heating.

 

[HenryAZ]

Cat6 cables can be in proximity to power cables only if they cross each other at right angles, never parallel to each other, as blacka4 says above.

Earlier mentioned was closets. That's a good way to move wires vertically, because you can just drill into to drywall floor/ceiling over in a corner of the closet and run the wire down the wall. For the separation between floors, use something stiff to get the wire through from one floor the the next ceiling below. They make sticks for this, but a coat hanger straightened out or a piece of heavy gauge copper wire (ground wire) will work fine. If you have to get it inside of a wall, drill a hole in the wall's top plate (in the attic, for example), and drop a string with a weight on it down into the wall. Cut the wall open where you want the box to be and go fishing for that string. If you lined up everything, you'll see the weighted end of the string dangling in the hole.

They make metal plate devices you can insert into a regular work-box sized hole that just require bending some tabs back around the drywall to hold them in place. The have screw holes for the cover plate. They are only approved for low voltage use, like network cabling, not for power cables. They are handy for putting a finished outlet just about anywhere in a drywall wall. They look like this:

 

[RedTomato]

I paid for my house to be wired, when it was renovated several years ago. Since then I've almost never used the wired network so it's been a waste of money to be honest.

At the time, the plan was to allow for putting TV in various rooms, plus a MythTV or similar server somewhere, and another server for my own use, plus allow the use of desktops where needed.

Since then, in the last few years:

- wireless technology has drastically improved

- Laptops have become much better and more powerful, everyone in my house uses laptops instead of desktops.

- iDevices have spread - iPhones and iPads, Kindles etc and me and my family do more browsing, emailing,reading and film watching on our handhelds than I ever expected.

- Netflix removed the need for a MythTV setup, and Netflix works fine over wireless

- servers have become smaller - Mac Mini and Intel NUC boxes now do an excellent job, and they can be located in any spare few inches of space.

- online services have drastically improved so I don't actually need a home server any more.

- we made a family decision to watch less TV and threw out our TV and cancelled our TV service (except for Netflix)

So our lovely wired network now sits mostly unused. Let that be a warning to you all.

 

[SHNXX]

I have wires running behind furnitures because I have no interest in paying some electrician to **** up the walls, so I have to pay some other guy to clean it up again.

The 150mbps wall plug things work reasonably well enough that I don't want to run the Ethernet wires through.

 

[JeffyTheQuik]

Having C

Does anyone have any info/advice on this? a few of you said about the cat5e cable not being near power cables? please let me know. do i need to move there the extra cable is or is it fine?

Having data cables intersect the power cables isn't that big of a deal, but running them parallel to them is. You generally want to keep the interface between the two to a minimum.

The absolute worst thing you could do is have two coils of wire, one data and one power on top of each other with metal in the middle.

 

[ftaok]

Here's a couple of ideas to consider. Applies mostly to recent construction, 1but I suppose older homes (around 10 years old) may have the same possibilities.

1. Do you have wired phone jacks located in the house? If so, what kind of cables were used? Also, where do the cable start from?

In my house (10 years old), the builder used CAT5e for the phone lines. He installed an On-Q box in the basement where the cable/phone lines come into the house. From there, the On-Q box splits the phone line into 4 separate phone runs (2 on the first floor, 2 on the second floor). Since we use cordless phones, 3 of the phone jacks are not used. I have thought about switching the jacks from RJ-11 to RJ-45 so I could run a proper "roaming" network on my 2nd floor.

2. Did the builder run a conduit from the basement up to the attic?

Getting stuff from the basement to the first floor is generally pretty easy. Getting it from the basement to the second floor is typically much harder. If the builder left you a conduit (typically a 2" PVC pipe) you run the cables up to the attic, then run the cable down from the attic to your 2nd floor rooms. Our builder put in a conduit so that I could do just that. My actual thought was that if I need to run more electric lines up to the 2nd floor (for ceiling fans), it would be a lot easier if the conduit was there. I haven't used it for either power or data, yet. Keep in mind that you can use it for one or the other, not both.

Also, some builders will run a radon pipe from the basement to the attic. That could be used as a conduit if the pipe is unused. Keep in mind that if your house does end up having a radon issue, you'll need to route the radon fan outside, or take your cables out of the pipe if you decide to use it for radon mitigation.

 

[jw12345678]

As someone said earlier, running cables up the outside of the property seems sensible. Run one cable from the basement to the first or ground floor, install a hub, and then run another cable up to the next floor from that hub. Better still would be to run separate cables for each floor outside up the wall from the router. (which would mean more cables on the outside, I know) This would be better though as each floor would be getting more bandwidth. Then run routers, Apple TV's whatever you want from the hubs. In the past the amount of data carried by each cable was miles in excess of most people's internet connection, but of course if you are squirting data from a phone or laptop upstairs to a server or another computer downstairs or indeed using faster wifi protocols you'll appreciate the extra cables and less chance of a bottleneck. In an ideal world you'd plug those new cables straight into the router. If you plugged them into a hub and then into the router you'll get a bottleneck there.

 

[robzr]

... I was not sure of this best place to post this so if an admin can move to a better locations, please do. So, I have FIOS (300 up/300 down -- so business FIOS connection in my house). I have a 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom house with finished basement. My FIOS connection and home office are in my basement. I managed to run a cat6 cable up 1 floor to my family room (behind my main TV), where i have a Linksys (ac router) that I have made a bridge. 95% of the time i am on my MacBook Pro in my bedroom 2 (2 floors up from the main router). The bridge made a HUGE difference and gives me great wireless speeds ....but its just not enough! I want to be hardwired on every floor!!

...So, my house is fully finished, how the hell do i run a cable from the basement, 2 floors up...
I thought I would push them down thru some power outlets (took the power outlet cover off and tried to push a network cable down in a few rooms and it just does not work). I have not yet made it into my attic, but not sure if that will help either. does anyone have any suggestions? has anyone else run cables with a finished house.

Hi Olletsocmit, a few thoughts on wired/wireless, my perspective is as someone who has consulted in this field and done a few network builds and migrations. At the risk of oversimplifying, wired is pretty much always better than wireless from a speed/reliability/security perspective, my advice would be to run cables whenever possible. In a finished house you may not have great options, there are often no magic bullets, you just have to deal with what you have. It's ideal to drop cable runs into walls when possible, you can use fish tape to do this on walls with insulation, but it can be frustrating work. Expect to drill through framing, especially when going between floors. If you have an attic, or can tolerate some cabling in your basement, this will make your life much easier. Alternately, you can remove molding, cut grooves in drywall, move long cable runs outside the house, or even go through the ducting as others have mentioned.

So you mentioned you do have an attic, what you may want to end up doing is find a good area to do your vertical run - like someone else mentioned if you have a closet on top of another closet, that could be a great spot. You can cut out a hole small enough to cover with a one or two gang wall plate and large enough to fit the head of a right angle drill/adapter into, and you can make clean drops through the framing. Or if you aren't comfortable with this, you can drill down through the floor as close as you can get into a corner, then get some plastic cable runner like Legrand Wiremold to cover the runs, you can make it very nice and clean.

As others have mentioned, don't try to reuse your high voltage power runs for low voltage cabling, this is a bad idea from both code/safety and reliability standpoints.

Bring the run into your attic and run it horizontally until you are over the wall you want to drop it into, interior walls will be easier (lack of insulation, most likely less framing for windows, etc), just be mindful of plumbing & electrical. You may also consider putting a switch in a closet or the attic, in case you want multiple drops on the top floor.

On one hand wireless technology is getting faster and better, but simultaneously the bandwidth is getting more crowded, this is particularily an issue on 2.4 GHz in urban areas. 5.8 GHz helps with this but it has it's own limitations, it doesn't do very well when there are obstructions (even drywall) between the router and client. Even for a good wireless system you will probably want (a) dedicated AP(s) on each floor if you care about speed and reliability.

Rob

 

[monokakata]

I've never used these, but they seem to be legal, and allow AC and low-voltage to exist in the same double-wide box. This is a separate issue from having AC and ethernet cables running in parallel.

http://www.amazon.com/Arlington-TVB..._sim_60_5?ie=UTF8&refRID=0R319QEXGCE67YQJKAMP

I have one place where I'm considering using this setup.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

This is a great thread. I'll chip in with another I've not seen referenced: any hollow walls? A fair amount of homebuilders insulate outer walls but inner walls are sometimes left hollow. You might be able to hear the difference by tapping them but drilling a hole in an inner wall that seems like it could be hollow and then feeling the resistance once you get through the drywall may be enough to confirm it.

If you can find hollow walls, getting up into the attic with string and heavy (I suggest fishing sinkers) weights can let gravity do much of the work:

• Drill small holes in the ceiling where you approx. want to drop a wire run,
• stick a Dowel rod through those holes so that you can find them in what is probably the sea of insulation in the ceiling,
• locate the (probably) wood that caps the wall (should be close to or right next to the Dowel rod if you drilled the Dowel rod hole right next to the wall)
• drill your hole for your wire run through that wood
• drop the sinker tied to the string through the hole you just drilled and let out the length of the wall slack
• tie it off in the attic (you should now have a sinker hanging from the end of string within your wall directly below the dowel rod you just inserted through your ceiling.
• repeat this everywhere else you want wire through hollow walls.

THEN,

• get out of the attic and go down into the rooms.
• drill a relatively small hole into the wall where the string should be. The Dowel rod overhead should give you a great clue for where to drill this hole
• use a hook tool to hook the string hanging in the wall and pull it and the sinker through the hole. Now you have a direct (string) connection between room and attic
• cut out the space around that hole for your ethernet jack port (box & wall covering plate).

At this point, you can either tie ethernet cable to the base of the string to pull up into the attic or take ethernet cable up into the attic, tie it to the string up there and pull it down to the hole. I usually prefer the latter because that tends to be easier though it usually requires a helper (one to feed the ethernet into the hole in the attic while the other pulls in the room below).

Repeat this for all of the places you want to run cable.

Afterwards, pull the dowel rods out of your ceiling and patch up the holes. You might need to touch them up with a little paint too.

In a 3-story home, this is going to be complicated by the construction of the floor & ceiling in the second story. In other words, the above should work fine for wiring the third story and the first story shouldn't be too complicated by pushing cable up through holes drilled from underneath. But the middle story is almost certainly going to have physical obstacles that will be difficult-to-impossible to penetrate without opening up a wall. For that, you might want to make the 2nd story a wifi zone or pick minimal & strategic locations for wiring, cut open a wall so you can easily work in the gap, cut through the floor or ceiling to gain access to (again, hopefully hollow inner walls) and then follow the above to pull down or pull up wire from either the third floor of the first floor. This will almost certainly require more skilled patchwork than the relatively tiny holes drilled as previously described.

Of course, if one has less financial constraints, they can accomplish all of this by simply tearing channels through drywall, routing wires wherever they want and then patching & painting the drywall. That works whether you find hollow walls or not but it will be more expensive, probably require more skilled labor and almost certainly require room paint jobs instead of touchup paint.

Lastly, if you go this way, I suggest really thinking about the possibilities. For example, why not 2 runs of ethernet cable to each jack? maybe optical too? maybe speaker wire to some of the same ports? RG6? If you are going to be doing this anyway, something closer to structured wire with 1-2 runs of multiple popularly-used cabling can come in handy. Wire is cheap. Do it while you're in there.

 

[vrillusions]

Because of how my condo is setup even though it's mostly two floor there's one room on first floor that doesn't have a second floor above it. I was able to run a wire in the attic of that room, have it run down the garage wall and back in to that room, which happens to be the room with entertainment center. I then hooked up a 5 port gigabit switch to hookup everything.

For wireless because of where things are located for a wireless signal to reach the tv, which has a firetv stick so no wired option, it has to go through an exterior wall, through aluminum siding, through a roof, and through a ceiling to reach it. Needless to say reception is poor. I bought a Netgear EX2700 range extender. It's located on the first floor such that the signal from the main router just has to go through a ceiling. Then it has pretty much line of site to TV. This helped immensly.

 

[steve62388]

Lots of good posts with instruction for installing your own ethernet cable but.... what a huge expense and time sink. In almost all cases Homeplugs are good enough. I guess the exception might be if you regularly transfer 10GB+ files around, I occasionally move 5GB - 12GB files around Homeplugs and they're fine.

If your wiring is of such poor quality that you can't get half decent speed from Homeplugs then you might have bigger problems with regards electrical and fire safety.

By the time 4K video becomes important Homeplugs will have been upgraded to cope.

 

[DEFabio]

Wish this post was around when I did my house. I'm a huge proponent for hardwired internet, but for your application it may be more feasible to go the wireless route. If you do decide to run ethernet cable, spend PLENTY of time looking at the layout of the house so you don't tear into walls and ceilings unnecessarily.
I probably used every technique mentioned in previous posts since my house was completely finished (except for utility room). I routed all the cables through the utility room then through a wall to the server rack in the basement. I used retrofit boxes (plastic frames with screws that clamp on to the back of the drywall) in each room which made for professional looking install. I didn't run cables in any vent, but I did drop the wires down alongside a vent in one room. Outside of that there was a lot of drilling to get to above floors and only a few walls and ceilings that I had to strategically cut into. For every hole I cut or drill, I tried to maximize it by routing as many cables through it as possible. Example-I would try to ethernet ports for adjacent rooms on the same wall so I would be able to route the wires for those rooms together (on one side of the wall would be the port for 1 room, and on the other side of the wall would be the port for the other room). Also as a side note, try keeping the ethernet as close to the length needed as possible. Have fun!

 

[Macman08]

While I was taught that running ethernet lines and power lines parallel to each other (less than 1 foot apart) is a big no no, how do businesses get away with it inside the cubical walls? All the wiring (phone, ethernet and A/C) is routed along the bottom 4" trim panel, and they are touching each other, in parallel, for great distances... with still very fast, business grade speed. I'm not saying that there won't be ANY signal degradation, but it's not as bad as you are lead to believe it is.

So while I try to minimize the interaction of A/C and ethernet, it isn't a stead-fast rule that they MUST be separate. Best Practices say it is preferred, but if it is the only option you have, then go for it.

 

[olletsocmit]

Hey guys, I just wanted to say that this is a great thread! I am glad i started it and asked the question. there is a ton of great info and advice here.

 

[xraydoc]

I have Fios in my house as well, and to run an Ethernet cable in to a remote area of the house with no way to actually run interior cat5/6 cable, the Fios installer ran coax on the exterior of the house and added a second coax-to-Ethernet MoCA box in that room.

Works quite well.

 

[monokakata]

For example, why not 2 runs of ethernet cable to each jack? maybe optical too? maybe speaker wire to some of the same ports? RG6? If you are going to be doing this anyway, something closer to structured wire with 1-2 runs of multiple popularly-used cabling can come in handy. Wire is cheap. Do it while you're in there.

HopeSoundDarryl talked about string. I forgot to mention a useful thing to do with string (mason's twine is what I use). When you run your cabling, leave strings behind. If you pull cable with a string, pull a second string at the same time. The reason is that if you don't run every damn wire you think you might ever need, the string will be there when you decide to run more cable. Just tie it off somewhere on the boxes. I learned this from an electrician, who asked me if I wanted him to leave a string. I didn't know what he meant. Now I do, and I leave strings whenever possible. Low overhead, practically zero cost, and potentially a huge help later on.

 

[laurim]

Guess I'm lucky that my basement isn't fully finished since I was able to run hdmi, optical, cable, etc. wires between my office and my living room. In my living room, I run the hdmi and power from my projector and the receiver either in a surface channel painted to blend in or in a space I left between the floor and the baseboards because it would be impossible to run it any other way. I looked up in the attic and I have ancient blown in insulation that I'm not willing to try to dig through to run any wiring in the attic. I stuck my head up into the attic and it looked like I magically stuck my head up into a beach somewhere, lol. When I ran speaker wire to hang speakers on the wall, the inside wall without insulation was pretty easy but the one on the outside wall with insulation was a royal PITA to fish through. Good luck!