Hi All, I'm planning on running CAT5 between all the rooms in my house and a central point.
What is the best way to run cables between floors? I'm looking at 50+ cables.
The mains wiring drops into the cupboard under the stairs but this is a very small passage that cannot be enlarged and I wouldn't want to run the low-voltage CAT5 alongside the mains. IEE wiring regs.
Thanks in advance, Martin.
Up the walls?
A duct from the ground to top floor would be your best bet, either larger size PVC electrical conduit or a wastepipe of whatever size you want. I would make sure you have access to each end of this for future upgrades. The other way is to use the inside of cupboards or similar to run the cat5's up inside, easy enough to get to in the future and out of the way, that's the way I've done it. ..
SJW A.C.S. Ltd.
Thanks for your reply. I totally agree a duct with access at both end is the ideal solution. The problem is concealing it, I only have one downstairs cupboard and that's under the stairs, unfortunately any holes drilled in the top of the cupboard come out on the stairs. Maybe I can get some slim but wide ducting that would not protrude the plaster.
You could cut a chase into the brickwork giving you more depth for bigger conduit. The other option is buy a bending spring, then you can route the conduit up to wherever you want. Just make sure it's not got too many sharp bends, long smooth bends are better if possible. This way you would have to run several smaller curved conduits rather than one larger straight one. ..
SJW A.C.S. Ltd.
Have you not got any waste pipes boxed in anywhere? This is what I have used in our (even older) house, there are a couple of boxed in pipes from upstairs loos.
The alternative is to go outside and find an inconspicuous place to run some trunking up the wall (adjacent to a pipe for example).
I put a false side on the chimney breast and run everything in there.
MrCheerful
On 17/02/2004 Martin opined:-
You might be able to drop the cables down the cavity between the inner and outer walls, assuming an outer wall might be a suitable location and you have not had cavity insulation fitted.
Thats what I'm planning upstairs, as I have a small peice of wall 4" (100mm). I'm going to remove the plaster and run two large pecies of conduit floor to ceiling and fill the gaps with plaster. Chimney breast is a good idea but ideally I want the run from the hall to landing for easy access in the future and its more central.
Thanks, To my delilght I've found I do have cavity insulation. Found this when I started installing security lighting outside, thought then I could drop the wires down the cavity, in the end I located the lights at the first floor level and drilled a hole straight in under the floorboards.
On 17/02/2004 Martin opined:-
You are not allowed to run mains cabling in the cavity, though obviously you can pass cables straight through them. Cat5 would not be a problem run in the cavities.
Didn't know that, I'm not disagreeing but do you have a reference in the regs where this is stipulated. I have seen lots of houses where the mains wiring is run in the cavity, mainly for outside lights. Also why would this be a problem?
Martin wrote on Tuesday (17/02/2004) :
I don't have a copy of the regs to refer to, but this point was recently mentioned in this ng. Other than the possibility than the cables might become overheated due to the cavities being later filled with insulation, I cannot think of any other obvious reasons.
It used to be permitted.
it's addressed in the Regs either way and would welcome a reference.
Personally, I wouldn't install mains cables in a cavity wall!
----- Original Message ----- From: Newsgroups: uk.d-i-y Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 2:44 PM Subject: Re: Running wires between floors 1930 Semi
CAT-5 outside is a potential lightning risk and personally I've suffered broken NICs from a nearby strike.
This has been mentioned before so a Google search should find the relevant messages.
The other possibility is not to install CAT5 cables at all, but use Wi-Fi. I've installed it recently, and I now wonder why I spent time and effort running cables in the house. I would not do it again!
I use 54g Wi-Fi myself, for my notebook, and whilst it's fine for internet access, it is *much* slower than a wired connection for anything else.
It's also shared bandwidth, so depending on the OPs intended use, number of devices etc, it may be so slow as to be virtually unusable :( Then there is the security aspect and the cost...
Lee
I doubt that wiring inside the walls of a building will make any significant difference to protection from lightening, unless the building was metal faced.
The number of CAT 5 cables mentioned was 50+. Assuming this was not a mistake, then it would completely swamp a wireless network. It does rather leave me wondering why so many.
In uk.d-i-y, Harry Bloomfield wrote:
Unlikely to be a mistake, just reflecting the incremental cost (in time and materials) of running 4 or 8 cables from each location to the central point, rather than a measly 1 or 2. As I've bored the group with a month or so back, I've just got 3 of the rooms in this place done so far, and there's 8 cables in one, and 10 in each of the other 2. Of the just-installed SWMBO-study, 6 of the 10 are spoken for (1 ISDN, 2 Ethernet to the hub in the loft (no need for a local hub in the room), 3 for analogue phone lines (to be picky, one is a real POTS line, the other 2 are HomeHighway split-out analogue lines). And in the corresponding ex-study downstairs which has the 8 lines in, 4 bring the telephony lines up to the loft, and one takes the local hub's uplink to the loft. Ironically enough, it's my study which has 10 lines and only 1 in use - ethernet uplink from local hub - since the *second* (employer-provided) ISDN line terminates in this room and is fed nowhere else, while its (work-paid) analogue split-outs from the TA are similarly room-local, while DECT provides links to the POTS and first HomeHighway lines.
Speaking of SWMBO, blessings upon her. We're even now: the time she saved me by providing a plasterer to scrape & skim over two ceilings (her study and our lad's bedroom) instead of me titting about with plasterboarding over and trying to make the joins invisible has now been swallowed up in the following: 'mmm, yes, I'll have those cheapie IKEA IVAR shelves, the 50cm deep ones will be just right for the A3+ papers I store, and I'll have a couple of the 30cm standard-depth ones on the other side. I'll paint them white myself, love.' Realities of elder-care meant that muggins here ends up doing the painting, of course: that's 25 shelves (10 deep, 15 standard), two sides each, primer and eggshell on top: 100 tedious paint applications, plus the 5 frames. (Put up a scaffolding pole in the downstairs den to hang them off while drying!). [time passes, c. 13 hours of painting time later, I'm building the shelves] 'Mmm, you know when you said rather than the std-depth freestanding shelves, I'd do better to have a wallfull of nice long Spur-bracketed shelves just like in your study? You were right, love. I'll fill up the two freestanders with books for now, but in a few months we'll put the std-depth ones down in the den and you can put up the Spur shelving'.
Add to that this evening's cracker: I've sweated blood to do a minimal-wires- showing installation of the Mac in the new study - powerstrips attached to the underneath of the big new desk, CPU suspended from said desk, lots of velcro and flexi-tounged trunking under the desk too to keep the wires off the floor and out of sight, more velcro cable ties to keep the various data/phone lines running up the back of the desk legs, PSUs cable-tied to the underframe of the desk; a luvverly job, if I say so myself. Reward for all this? 'Hmm, love the way the wires have gone away. Not sure if I can stand the *noise* of the new Mac, though.' This referring to a G4, notably quieter than most PCs. 'Oh it's not the overall noise level, love, there's a particular high note that bothers me'. Drawing on the special reserve tank of patience, Stefek suggests that the echoey nature of the as-yet-unbookfilled room may accentuate the noise [quietly seething that it's the one aspect of the machine I can't magic away], and further suggests in a dangerously calm voice that living with it for a month might result in habituation. But I've offered to house the CPU in my study next door, leaving just the display in her room (the flashy Apple LCD monitor has a single cable taking video+USB, while the keyboard and trackball are wireless anyway). The plasterboard wall between the two will readily support removal of a little slot on each side for the connector to pass through, and a little bit of discrete trim over same once the cable's through. Eeh, Gawd give me strength...
Stefek
So this would be a bad time to suggest that power to an electric shower is constant, that amps go down as volts go up, and that the safest thing to do is up the capacity of the MCB anyway? ;-]
Al
PS Info about the iMac was particularly useful - I didn't realise they could be detached. Also, I think you're right about the books softening the noise.
Sorry to mislead - it's not an iMac (they *can't* be detached, very much an all-in-one) but the tower Macs (a G4 in this case, pretty sure it's true for the G5 also) and the (VESA-standard?) LCD display screen (a bit overpriced but pretty): that's the thing with the single cable which carried video and USB (multicore, not some encoding magick ;-) which would make put-the-CPU-in-the-room-next-door feasible.
I'm sure I'm right about the books too: it's whether SWMBO's ears will be convinced ;-)
Cheers, Stefek
All my network runs at 100Mb/s, difficult to get that fast with wireless at the moment (and/or expensive).
Wires *anywhere* are potential lightning risk. OK, outside is worse but it does very much depends where you are and what the surroundings are like whether it's a significant problem.
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