Telephone wiring question

[chemqueries]

I thought that when hooking up a phone, the important wires are the red and the green. I thought that the red wire from the phone line is supposed to be coupled with the red wire in the wall jack, and the green wire from the phone line is supposed to be coupled with the green in the wall jack. Today I examined the wires inside the jack box, and I see that a tan/white wire from the phone line is coupled with the red in the wall jack box, and a blue wire from the line was coupled with the green wire in the box. I tried to re-do the pairings by matching the red from the line with the red in the box and a green from the line with the green in the box, but when I did that, I didn't get a dial tone. What's going on?

[RBM]

[CL (dnoyeB) Gilbert]

It looks like someone had a 2nd phone line, and it was converted at some point back into a single line in the house. The 2nd line was run on the

2nd pair.

[meirman]

In alt.home.repair on 25 Jul 2005 01:59:54 -0700 "chemqueries" posted:

It's good that you know what the original pair was.

BTW, with dial phones and no party line, the red and green wires of the phone were interchangeable. With touch tone, you'll get a dial tone if they are backwards, but you can't dial.

Meirman

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[~^Johnny^~]

[Tekkie®]

meirman posted for all of us... I don't top post - see either inline or at bottom.

BWAAAAA nooooooooooooooooooooo

[HorneTD]

That was only true with the old five hundred telephone sets. More modern instruments do not have polarity sensitive key pads.

[chemqueries]

Well, I admit that I had to write it down so I wouldn't forget!

Hello john. You said that red would be connected to blue and green to white-blue, but on my phone white/tan was connected to red, and blue was connected to green, and it's working.

[~^Johnny^~]

[meirman]

In alt.home.repair on Tue, 26 Jul 2005 13:06:54 GMT HorneTD posted:

Did not know that. Thanks to you and Johnny.

(It will probably be another decade before I get to "modern instruments". :)

Meirman

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