I am remodeling an old house and in some of the rooms on the baseboard are very old phone jacks. However in the living room and family rooms, they installed two jacks, like below:
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I am trying to figure out why. I do not have the phone line turned on yet, since the house will be worked on for the next six months and not inhabited, I don't see the need to pay for a land line for six months. But I would like to move the jacks into the wall which is not a big deal just need to get a small box and some drywall patching is all that is necessary.
However, I wonder if these two jacks mean there are two separate lines. Is there a way to tell?
Open them up. See if they are simply series wired or separate. The spade lugs from the modular jack - if they are all going to the same cable pairs it's wired for a single line.
But as long as it's multi pair cable it can be two lines.
BTW - tell us the avocado carpet is going away . . .
I would take the covers off and see how the wires are connected. Maybe you can see that the big white wire goes from one box to the next, and that the connections to the two boxes are in parallel. Or maybe you'll see red and green to one, and black and yellow to the other, or some such. That would probably mean two lines.
Right now they have single boxes with two jacks, but I don't know if they had that when the style here was the most popular. (Although I think maybe you can still get these.)
Here or in cases where all the wires are in the walls, you can also use an ohmmeter(sp?) to see what the resistance is between the L1 of one box and the L1 of the other, the L2's, the L1/L2 and L2/L1, and any other combination. I suggest more than the minimum measurements because people can come up with wierd ways to wire things. (I do, although there is always a good reason. :) )
And finally, I'd find where all the phone lines are connected and see how it is done and where the wires go from there. My house has never had more than one line, and the connection place has 4 "clip-strips" that are used and each wire atttached is attached to all four. So I know nothing fancy is going on.
Let me add an 11th- if you will be opening and patching walls anyway, and the house is empty, this is the best chance you will ever have to upgrade the phone wires to cat 5e or cat6, and a home-run or star topology, vs. the point-to-point or tree style it probably has now. From your photo, I'd almost bet 2nd jack is on 2nd pair of RGYB old-style premises wire. Business/kids/fax line, a non-ma-bell DSL hookup, or something.
I have a related question: wondering how the wires should be handled if one simply wants to remove a phone jack from the center of a wall and drywall over the opening? Does one need to do anything special or can they be dropped in behind the drywall.
It's best to disconnect them at the source if you can; if this is not an option, clip them so there's no bare metal showing or tape them, and tuck them away.
Unfortunately it seems these wirings were added later and it sort of tucked itself under door trims, under carpets etc...and now I need to find ways to figure out which I need and which I don't. I guess it is difficult to figure that out without actually having a service and see.
There are a mixture of older and newer jacks around and I can't find any pattern or any indication on any plans.
Thanks what you said makes sense. To forget about those old phone wires and do new ones all over. And yes I will be opening walls, replacing floorings, replacing baseboards and adding doors etc... anyways.
However I also would like to consider a few things as well...
(1) Do I really need cat5e or cat6 wiring for all rooms with wireless phones and internet nowadays. Should I really have one set of wiring done to a den or where my desktop computer will be and where my master phone, printer, fax etc... will be and just let wireless do the rest or is there inherent value for have an outlet in every bedroom?
(2) On the contrary, the coax cable is in the same shape. I see cable coming into the house. where the splitter runs along the outside of the house under the soffit with splitters that are half way corroded and no coax outlet in every room. So I think I need to lump the coax cable problem with this into one bigger problem. I do like to have the option of having a TV in different rooms and kitchen etc...
So now I am talking myself into running both coax and Cat6 to all rooms. Am I making sense? What else should I do that may be helpful?
Cat 5 is not necessary for phones. If you are getting DSL for Internet then you only need Cat 5 for that one location. The phone company will install that.
If you have a network, you will be using wiring from the router location to each computer and not to the phone service. This wire should be Cat 5 or you could use wireless.
Likewise, if you are getting cable Internet, the extra computers will need to be wired to the cable router location.
Well, you could take a battery and, perhaps with a couple wires with alligator clips on each end (sold in a 10-pack at Radio Shack, among other places) and hook the battery up to a pair of phone wires, then use a meter to find out what jacks go with what pairs.
But I don't see any special need or rush to do that, when you have so many other things to do, and you can also wait until the phone service is connected.
If the phones, all or most jacks, were working when the other guy moved out, they'll still work for you.
I have a friend who works on his car quite a bit, and eventually I found out that most of what he does is, when he buys a new used car is to change all the hoses and belts. I otoh have only changed 3 or 4 hoses or belts in the last 30 years, because the ones that are there seem to last 50 or 100 thousand miles until I get another car.
If I were a contractor coming in to work on your house, I'd want to get it all done right before I left. But you live there and you don't charge travel time. So, especially considering all the projects you have going now, I don't see any problem just redoing the parts you find ugly, and replacing other stuff as needed.
Phone lines were one of the reasons I got the original blueprints for my house, but they weren't listed iirc. The first owner had put another layer of sheetrock over most of the bedroom walls, including covering the phone jack.
If all the devices are on different pairs, a splitter won't work. (Unless you find one with L1, L2, L3 outputs.) So unless you have the parts on hand to kludge up a multi-keystone box, daisy-chaining vanilla boxes is the only option. Trying to do a commercial-type drop with consumer-grade stuff can be a PITA at times. Other than the over-priced faux LAN stuff at the borg, retail places only seem to carry residential stuff, and most homeowners would be clueless as how to order the 'real' parts online.
I have a speakerphone from Radio Shack. It's a phone with no ringer and no dialing, so you need a regular phone too. It had an extra jack on it for that purpose. However the built-in cord broke off a long time ago (they do) so it has to be connected using that extra jack.
Since those 3 jacks were here before I bought the house, I don't know what they were all used for. Maybe someone hadn't heard about the multi-jack adapters. A lot of people don't know about such things.
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