Home Networking

Home Networking. Most folks wifi out. Then they run into all of the issues of wi-fi, from coverage, blockage, the neighbor's kid playing Second life, to security in many flavors of bad.

A client of mine wanted to wire up his split level. He has Cable Internet. Not a problem. First we located the closet with the scuttle hole for the attic. This serves a couple of purposes. You are going to have to crawl around in the attic to find where the electricians drilled through the top plates to run the electric wire. In most cases there is a one inch hole containing only one or maybe two pieces of romex. There is a lot of room to run Cat 5e, the successor to Cat 5, and with the right parts, capable of a 1000MB, which in your house you can't get yet, but connectivity has always gone up and price has come down.

This is where I installed a shelf in the closet, for stuffing the Cable Modem and the Cable/DSL Router. This shelf is above the top of the door trim so it is out of the way. The other reason for using this closet is that when you are pulling wire around your attic, it goes a lot smoother, when you are not trying to go though the cutout, and the hole on the top plate while you are negotiating around your attic.

The attic is a dreadful place filled with insulation, and years of dirt and dust. You will want to wear a mask and make sure your shower works well for your adventures here. Here in arizona the attics get real hot. You will sweat like a marathon runner. You will have to pull the insulation back out of your way so you can figure out where the walls are and where the electrician drilled holes for his wire. You will be using these same holes for your cable runs. This project is a two-fer, as the client decided in mid stream to put in CATV cable as well. Since you have a computer, for 30-200 bucks you can install a TV Tuner card in your PC and watch the news while you are surfing.

From left to right, an 'Old Work' outlet box. Looking closely, you can see the wing at the back/top of this type of box. There is one at the bottom as well. These work by cutting a hole large enough to hold the box, and when you insert it, and tighten the wing screws, they rotate and clamp the box to the drywall. Yes you can get all sorts of 'speciality' low voltage boxes, weird rings, but if you use these standard boxes, you only have to remember one type at the hardware store, you can get them in bulk, and you will only have to learn one cutout style. Plus. you can get them at just about every hardware store.

Next is a roll of tape, in this case 2'' painters tape, which was the first roll I found. This is for marking the wires as you pull then through the walls and around the attic. You tape a flag to the end of the cable with the location of the other end, #1, #2, etc.

I have two cutouts here. One is for the network cables, and the CATV run which will run the cable modem to power the router. The box on the left is for a standard 110 volt outlet, to power the modem and router. Most houses of this type usually have staggered closets. The wall between the bedrooms is split in half, which means that it is the wall in bedroom 1, is the same wall as the back of the closet in bedroom 2. Almost always there is an electric outlet on these walls, making getting power for this outlet a relatively simple proposition.

Here is a situation where we need to install a cable outlet. You can take off the cover plate to figure out which side of the electric outlet the stud is, measure an 1/2'' over and make your opening, or you can simply install the box below the existing electric box. Do check inside the box to make sure that the romex is entering the box from the top, which it is in 99% of the cases, as electricians almost always drop into a box from the top. The exception is in multi-story houses, where they may be using a larger box as a pull through, for another circuit going to a lower floor.