Hello all - I think this is my first post here, but I am a frequent reader and lurker.
We are doing some remodeling in our kitchen. To "clean things up" before we have some tile demo'd, I cut some wires out of an OLD phone connection in the wall - this is the kind before modular, where the phone cord entered the plate through a hole and hard-wired into the phone wiring. Although this was an OLD connection, it was apparently "live" as we now have no dial tone.
I've tried doing some research on phone wiring to see if I can fix this myself - and haven't seen reference to my situation. There appear to be 6 wires coming into the box - all with solid brown insulation. So - I'm not sure which ones to join together to reconnect the line. We have only one active phone line.
Does anyone know how this is supposed to work? I'm not well-equipped with testers - is there one I could buy to find the active wires?
Check voltage between each possible wire pair, or just touch them together and watch for a little spark. Those two are the phone in. Short together the wires at your non-working phone. Measure the other wires with an ohmmeter till you find the ones that are shorted. Connect those to the two input wires you found earlier. Reverse the connection if the touch tones don't work at the now working phone.
If by removing those connections you lost dial tone to other phone jacks in the house, one of two things occurred. Either the phone line pair (two wires) passed through the junction point you disconnected in which case you need to identify which two wires are the incoming phone line and which are the feed to the other phone jacks, or you shorted out the phone line in which case you need to remove the short.
To determine if you have a short, try calling your number from another phone like a cell phone. If you get a busy signal you likely have a short since a short will take the phone line "off hook".
If you don't have a short, find an extra short modular phone cable and a convenient newer phone to use for testing. Cut one end off the modular cable and strip back the insulation to get the red and green wires at a reasonable length. Strip the ends of the red and green wires and the mystery wires at the old phone jack point.
Mark the mystery wires with some masking tape and numbers so you can keep track of them. Get a piece of paper and write down all the possible pairings of the mystery wires. Sequentially work through each possible pair connecting the red and green wires from your test phone and see if you get dial tone (you can leave it off hook). The polarity of the wires won't matter for most any modern phone, only quite old phones were polarity sensitive.
Once you find the incoming phone line mark you will then need to figure out which of the remaining four wires are the feed to the other phone jacks. With a phone plugged into one of the other phone jacks you'll have to experiment connecting the two wires for the incoming phone line to the various combinations of the remaining wires until you have the other phone working. Once you have that remote jack working you may find you need to connect the remaining two wires to the incoming line as well to activate another remote phone jack.
Phone line voltages are generally safe. Only if the line rings when you're holding the wires will you get a shock, and even then it's more annoying than dangerous.
When you have it sorted out be sure to label the connections for future reference.
These wires (called Tip and Ring) are the ones with the signal on them. Hopefully, the others are not connected. Even a cheap meter would be a good thing to have.
Red and green are the standard, but someone hooking up a phone is not compelled to use the standard colors. They would have saved you some trouble if they had, but they had this 6-brown wire on hand, and picked two wires and forced it to work. You might be able to tell by looking at the ends of the wires. Maybe only two of the six have been "stripped" (had half an inch of insulation removed), or are otherwise different from the four unused wires, from having been used in the phone circuit. Then you have to test which of the two wires is positive and which is negative, but if you just hook up a phone to them it might work either way. Really though, you'd be better off replacing the 6-brown with modern modular-plug wiring.
Is this a flat cable, or round? If it's flat, they probably used the two center conductors. But like others have said, get your mutimeter out and start checking two at a time.
Or maybe they are just brown. My friend in Teaneck had 3 wires coming in from the street, all brown. So at the OP's box, he has 3 wires in and 3 out. There are 6 x 5 = 30 possible pairs that would be hot. I would find them the hard way. Get from Radio Shack a bag of 10 wires with alligator clips on the ends, maybe 4$ and useful for loads of things. Get a phone with red and green; connect red to one of the 6 wires, using the alligator wires; and touch the greeen wire to each of the 5 remaining brown wires (It probably is easiest to use an alligator wire for this too), and see if you have a dial tone. If not, then connect the red to a different brown wire, and touch the green to each of the remaining 4, etc. until you find the hot wires.
Then connect them both, and see if you can dial with touch tone. If not, as they say, they're backwards. Reverse them and mark one brown wire as green, one as red.
** Don't worry, they're not hot enough to hurt you unless you are standing on a ladder and you fall off.
Then go to a phone in another room; connect the brown/red to one of the remaining 4 brown wires, using the alligator wire; and while someone in the other room listens for a dial tone, touch the green/brown wire to each of the remaining 4. Then change the brown wire connected to the brown/red wire and touch the remaining three, etc. until you know which pair is the outgoing pair. Again, see if you can dial and if not reverse the wires.
Once everything is working, I would slide some heat shring tubing on e each wire and solder the wires, then slide the heat shrink over the connection and shrink it. Or maybe there are screw terminals to connect everything to.
You can also connect the 3rd wires, once you have established which are the 4 working wires. Maybe the last two are doing something also, if not for the phone company, for a previous owner.
Thanks for all of the replies! The spot where these wires are is an old phone connection - one that I intend to cover up as we retile the kitchen. All of the current jacks are of the modern type (with real red and green wires). What I'm looking at are six loose brown wires - no cable or sheath.
I got some good tips here - I'll give it a try this weekend. And, just in case, I still have an appointment scheduled with the telco!
Given the "hard-wired" aspect of the telephone set that WAS there, it sounds like the 3-conductor "JK" wire used MANY years ago by The Bell System.
If you carefully strip the insulation from the end of each conductor, that should expose BOTH the copper conductor AND colored THREAD that indicates the conductor's color: Red, green and yellow. Connect the two reds together, the two greens together and the two yellows together. That MAY restore service to the phone outlets that are beyond that location, assuming the kitchen location was just one in a LOOP-configuration-wired home. Good luck!
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