Having no luck when trying to add another phone socket.
BT cable runs under the house. From there two wires of the BT cable are connected to Orange/White and White/Orange of two cables that run to the two existing (+working) sockets. I simply added a third pair to that junction (O/W and W/O) and run to the new socket. In the new socket I connected O/W to terminal 3 and W/O to 4 as per
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but am getting nothing from the new socket (no ringing, dialing tone, etc).
I check for continuity of the new cable (O/W and W/O) and they seem OK.
Terminal 4 is not used. The incoming line uses two conductors and connects to 2 and 5. If you then want to go out to extensions you need to use 3 conductors, 2, 5, and 3. The extra conductor on terminal 3 is the ring wire - without it the extensions won't ring.
Well, about 90% of anything built post 1990 will ring. About 10% of phones won't ring, generally ancient bell type phones, with a few surprising modern designs thrown in for good measure.
I appreciate this but the cables that feed the two other extensions only have O/W and W/O connected in the junction under the house. So I assumed that it did not matter if I connected the other wires inside the new socket, as only those two cables are connected on the other end anyway...
Sounds like you have a bodge. The correct colours for the line are blue, not orange. One of the 'oranges' is used for the bell wire. The others aren't normally used for anything. Two wires go to the master socket (different colours if the actual incoming line), then three to the others.
Here are the standard colours of cable, flex and their terminals.
Old Terminal Cable Cord Function 1 Green/white Orange Spare Blue 2 Blue/white Red B wire (Line) -50v Brown 3 Orange/white Blue Shunt wire. (Bell) Green 4 White/orange Green Local earth (Not usually used) Orange 5 White/blue White A wire (Line) 0v 6 White/green Black Spare
Hello Peter, incoming line will be connected on A and B connector (screw terminals) on the NTE box which looks about 4 inches square an can have the bottom section unscrewed to reveal the customers extensio wiring. If you do not have one of these the line will terminate on and 5 of the MLJU (master linejack unit) the blue pair should b terminated on these connectors. A single telephone no matter whethe corded or cordless is not polarity conscious, however all extension are! If you have a test meter put it across the pair of you extension, you should see around 60volts DC if you get this voltage yo will more than likely get dial tone, if you don,t change the connector over in 2 and 5.
The ringer wire connects from the MLJU on number 3 and must have goo continuity through to the extension socket. If all the conditions ar met then everything should work.
As an afterthought to anyone else who may read this, the reason a lo of "foreign" phones do not work even though they look as if they hav the correct plug on the end of the cord is that some continental an American systems wire their sockets on 1 and 6 so if we connect on and 5 the plug is not connected to anything in the socket. Hope thi helps. Used to do it for a living
I think you're assuming that the person who installed your existing sockets using O/w and W/o followed Peter's diagrams where the O/w and W/o are on 3 & 4. They didn't.
It doesn't matter what the wire colours are - the incoming line is on 2 & 5. You should however use a twisted *pair* of wires, not one wire from then orange pair and another wire from the green pair.
Thanks or all the advice - I gave it another look and I think that I now know what is going on here:
I just noticed that I have two "master socket" fitted (don't ask - only moved in two years ago, and it was done before then). This is why only one pair was feeding each and everything was still working. As it is going to be quite tricky to run the new extension from one of the two masters, I think that I will put one of them under the house and run two extensions of it (new one and one replacing the removed master)
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