There's an old, wall-mounted rotary phone in the kitchen and it's mounted on a rectangular board affixed to the wall. I'm sure the phone's been there since the house was built in 1972. I'd like to take it out and replace it with a wall-mounted push button phone. Will the rotary phone wiring work for a modern push button phone or is new wiring in order? Also, what kind of phone wiring connector(s) is/are required or needed in order for me to install a wall-mounted push button phone in the kitchen?
Hi, Of course it will work. I think you'll need a little phone junction box to accomodate RJ-45 plug. ie. you have to adopt pair of wires to modular RJ-45 plug. If I were you I'd install DECT 6.0 cordless phone base and scatter the sub sets around the house for convenience.
The wires are the same, but the plug, if any, may differ. There are four wires. Connect the wires to the RJ-45 wall mount jack that is available at any hardware, home store, etc., then attach the phone to the mount.
That old rotary phone is coming back in style. There is a demand as people are restoring older homes and want the old phones in the colors to match the
Old wiring will work just fine. You will need a wall-mount jack which can be picked up in a hardware store. It usually has screw terminals inside so all you need is a screw driver to install it. Well, I'm skipping the part where you remove insulation from the wires. I've seen it done in many different ways using wire stripper, snips, knife, teeth, nails etc. Wire stripper being the neatest and the safest.
Good luck!
\\//.
-------------------------------------
##-----------------------------------------------## Delivered via
formatting link
Construction and Maintenance Forum Web and RSS access to your favorite newsgroup - alt.home.repair - 266711 messages and counting! ##-----------------------------------------------##
buffalo ny: probably if it uses a modular connector behind it it's easy. if it is a wired phone, install a surface-mounted wall phone jack to hang your new phone on, it often has a very short wire provided to plug into the jack and the new phone. and more; in case you've fallen and can't get up, that phone mounted near floor level can still dial 911 for emergencies. here the dial tone at 48VDC is coming down one pair of wires per phone line. superimposed on it for ringing is 90VAC, with the caller ID data arriving between the first ansd second ring. if that phone is working properly, it will still be working when cordless phones lose power in a power failure. if it has a mechanical ringer it may have a ringer equivalence number on it on the bottom, the phone company ringers did load the ringing amperage to its limit after several phones were all ringing at once. the measurable resistance from the phone company was measured depending on the number of ringers on the line when determining what the desired resistance was from the phone company to you, so as to compare to any service trouble you reported. in the case of old wiring it can be disconnected from the dial tone and phone and tested with an insulation tester that measures megohms under load with a hand-cranked 700 volts such as a megger. this will reveal insulation breakdowns that lead to out of service conditions such as high resistance shorts from age, heat, humidity, and critters.
Go buy yourself a new phone. Take it home and get it out of the box. READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. Then take the old phone off the wall, and READ THE INSTRUCTIONS again. Then follow the instructions! (Alternately, chuck the instructions, look at what you've got and go buy what you need.)
Or, also buy yourself a cell phone with a camera it, and when you get stuck simply take pictures of what you have. Post them somewhere convenient for others to access, and then post the URL here (or better yet, post to alt.dcom.telecom.tech).
Otherwise, *you* are the only one who can actually look at what you have, and everyone telling what to do is
Frank, what does it mean if the old phone had been rented from the phone company? How would a formerly rented phone affect a conversion to a push button phone using the same wiring?
RJ45 is 8 wire for network. IIRC a phone connector is RJ11 or RJ14. (The phone only uses 2 wires of 4 or more in the building phone wiring cable.)
New wall phones often attach to a plate that includes a phone connector in the middle. You push the phone toward the wall and slide it down slightly. Find out what the new wall phone requires. Like Floyd wrote - read the instructions. When buying, info on the package might help.
When old rotary phones were in use, there were no jacks & plugs; they wired directly into the boxes on the wall.
RJ-11, a 6 pin plug & jack, with 6 pins, only 2 or 4 of them used, is correct for ALL analog telephones, rotary or DTMF. Either one, you connect them red wire to red wire and yellow wire to yellow wire. An RJ-45 is a 8 pin connector and NOT used with residential phone systems on dialtone ckts; it's non standard.
Some telcos will still work with a rotary phone, but NOT ALL. Before you spend money on a rotary phone that outputs rotary pulses, be certain it'll work with your telco or you'll have wasted your money. The better "rotary" phones you find today will have a converter in them to count the pulses and convert them to DTMF digits for the telco. No old, original rotary phone is going to do that, so your telco must accept rotary pulses in order for them to work. Rotary signalling is a thing of the past.
Please be careful of misinformation when you aren't sure what you're talking about.
That's because they're not really the old rotary phones but newer electronic ones that only seem to be rotary.
Personally I like the old rotaries myself. I even had an old rotary pay phone hooked up in the kitchen; great conversation piece.
NO, it is because people are buying the ORIGINAL old phones. I said what I meant and I meant what I said.
You can see them here
formatting link
Down towards the bottom.
Or go directly here
formatting link
we have New Old Stock touchtone and rotary dial phones made years ago by ATT, Stromberg Carlson, ITT and Northern Telecom. They're great if you're nostalgic for the mid-20th-century, or just like the look, feel and sounds of a rotary dial.
Hints for OP- If handset cord is modular, the wall mount is probably modular. Also look for another layer of metal between the phone and the wall, usually silver in color. If you see that, give the phone a sharp upward rap on the bottom, and see if it pops up and off the wall. In the transition era to the smaller 2550 TT wall phones, they even had matching trim plates to cover up the mounting plate of the big old rotary wall phones and/or the mismatched paint spot. If there is no modular mounting plate, you will need to 'skin' the phone to get it off the wall. Look for a notch at the bottom, where you can stick in a flat-blade screwdriver to release the latch thingy. Once cover pops off, the mounting screws and feedwire screws should be self-evident.
(I used to do some moonlight telephone work in that era, and still have a couple crates of old WE phones in basement that I need to sort through and do the mix-and-match on one of these days.)
aem, not a fan of modern throwaway phones, sends...
Just thinking offhand that old rotary phone could still be rented from the telephone company. Your bill would show this if it were so. It's been a long time since phone company customers could use their own phone and I believe options were to give the phone back to the company, buy it or continue rental. I had heard of someone continuing rental.
Chuckle. Take 'collectible' values with a grain of salt. In the case of ebay and old phones (which I happen to have a bunch of), I did some looking in the sales, not just the current asking prices. Oddball and novelty phones did okay, but conventional ones, not so much. WE/Ma Bell sold/abandoned in place a hell of a lot of rotary (and early TT) desk and wall phones- millions are still out there and in use, with people who don't move every seven years. And old real phones are . You will have to charge so much for shipping, that people will think you are ripping them off.
I may bother to clean up and sell a few of the odd ones in my accidental collection some day. But the value isn't high enough, so far, to make it worth a lot of effort on my part. As long as I have extra storage space, they aren't costing me anything sitting there.
As to not wanting one- of the 5 phones currently hooked up in this house, 4 are old WE phones. (I have a disposable phone in guest room, just for the memory function on it, handy for 20-digit international dial-around services.) And yes, the one in master bedroom is rotary. I may make an outgoing call from that room once a year, and it still works fine and looks pretty. How many modern disposables will be able to say that after the 25+ years I've had that one?
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.