I bought a phone jack with four terminals labeled "G" (green), "R" (red), "Y" (yellow), and "B" (black).
However, none of the wires in the telephone cable in the wall have those colors.
See the photo at:
Which wire do I attach to each terminal in the phone jack?
Thanks in advance.
Your link is not working.
A telephone in the US usually onlyuses 2 wires eventhough there may be 3 or most often 4 wires in the cable.
The phone will have voltage of around 15 or so volts DC on it at very low current (probably not enough to hardly see a spark if shorted) when not ringing. When it rings it will have aroud 90 volts pulsing with each ring. Not much danger if no incomming call,and even if you do get a call the voltage will not be that dangerouse,but will sure make you hurt yourslef when you jump back .
If you have a volt meter, see which wires have from 10 to 20 volts DC on them. Those will be the ones to hook to the red and green wires of the phone jack. If no vom, just hook up one wire to the red jack post and touch each of the other 3 wires to it. If you get a dial tone, you are good to go with those 2 wires. If no dial tone, take that wire off and connect one of the 3 remaining wires to the red post. Then try the other 2 one the other post. If no dial tone, that shuld just leave you the last 2 wires to connect to the red and green post. Most times it will not matter which wire is green and red, but sometimes it may depending on the phone. So you may have to repeat the above using the green jack post.
Or go look at another working jack on the line and see which two colors it's using. Assuming the new jack is to be shared on that line, those are your colors. It's it's a jack on a new additional line, then you can rule out the two on the existing jack.
Link not working here either
If the wire colors are striped instead of solid, what you may have is CAT5 "internet" LAN cable, instead of telco standard "J/K" wire.
If so , here is conversion chart
But if you can, as trader4 said, open up an existing jack to confirm that the blu/white & wht/blu pair was used for Line 1.
Having fun yet ......... ;-)
Give this link a try:
Not working, try this free image hosting service
It says you gotta upgrade your account to enable 3rd party hosting. Apparently photosucket ain't making enough money shoving popup spam-ads up everyone's asses.
The easiest way for you to determine which of these six pairs are carrying your 1 phone signal is to open up the jack that your phone connects to and see what wires are connect to the terminals in that jack.
To save some time, open it up then take and post some pictures.
OK, so you've got the newer yet 6 pair (12 wire) house cable. The b/w & w/b pair is still Line 1, to be attached to the jack per the chart at
Here are photos of the wiring in the working jack:
Ok, way too many wires. Get a voltmeter and find the 2 wires at a working jack and hook the same color wires to the red and green terminals of the 4 wire jack.
Mentioned above the phone wires will have between 10 and 20 volts on them. If you pick up a telephone and get a dial tone, the voltage will drop several volts.
Looks like the solid gray wire goes to the green terminal and the gray/white wire goes to the red terminal.
Looks like some chucklehead wired your phones using the gray/white pair.
Line 1 should be blue/white pair.
Line 2 should be orange/white pair.
Bob, ignore Bubba.
If you follow my instructions of connecting the solid gray to the green and the gray/white to the red, your new jack will work fine.
I get what looks like a picture, but there's no wires in it. A message saying "PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE 3RD PARTY HOSTING".
The house I lived in in 1970 had 3 pairs (like CAT5 except no brown pair). I forget which pair had phone.
[snip]I used a 8-ohm speaker. It's enough load to make the exchange think you're "off hook" and you can hear the dial tone.
Per Stormin' Mormon's directions, I connected the solid gray to the green and the gray/white to the red.
When I plug in the base unit into the jack, I'm getting Error message "Check tel line" which, according to the user manual, means "The telephone line cord is not connected properly"
What would you call twisted-pair cable that has only 3 pairs (blue/green/orange but no brown)? My parents had a house built in 1969 using this. The house had the WIRING going to each bedroom but the only jack was in the kitchen. For years I thought there were jacks in the bedrooms, because the boxed weren't covered by blank plates but plates with round holes in them (like you'd use for a F connector). However, there were just wires behind them.
In the CAT5 I have here, one wire of each pair is solid color, the other is striped.
I get the same thing as before. Perhaps is works for you because you have an account. It would be a good idea to try it with a different browser, one without your login.
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