wire sizes

What size wire and how many conductors do I need to wire up telephones, thermostats, & doorbells in the house that I am building?

Reply to
dbljay7542
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Typical telephone wire is 24 gauge, we usually use Cat5

Doorbell and thermostats typically use 18 gauge bell wire

Reply to
RBM

telephone 2, but now - a - days they are pulling cat 5 for them

thermostats 8 conductor thermostat wire usually. Although some require more.

doorbell is 18/2

Reply to
Steve Barker

If you have to ask here, perhaps you should not be doing it. Thermostats especially, Conductors vary depending on the heating/cooling system installed.

You should be in the book store researching.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

He has a good point, because there is a lot to be learned besides the number of wires. Are you building the whole house yourself, or just putting in the wiring?

As to phone conductors, Does Cat-5 mean 5 conductors. I think 10 is what my house was built with and it seems like a good idea to me. The phone company put in 4 decades before anyone used 4.

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Reply to
mm

"mm" <

"Cat 5" has 4 PAIRS of conductors. (That&#39;s 8 conductors)

It&#39;s used for networking. 4 pair telephone cable would do the same job.

The Cat 5 cable has the twisting of the pair optimized so that it can carry the digital signals without excess crosstalk, etc.

I&#39;m not "up" on the color code but once you get to a certain number of pairs telco wiring uses a scheme where each pair has two colors: the base and the "trace" color. In a particular pair, one conductor might be Red with a blue trace and the other conductor will be Blue with a red trace.

At the 4 pair level (8 wires) I think they still just use solid colors.

Reply to
John Gilmer

snipped-for-privacy@v39g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...

Cat 5 cable = Category 5, 4 twisted paired wires which are unshielded and suitable for high speed digital connections. Most commonly sold as CAT

5e. Good for digital communications up to 100 Mega bits per second (100BaseTX Ethernet protocol). Cat 5e specification by Manufactures usually is good for 350 Mega bits per second.

The Category 5 comes from an industry standard ANSI/EIA 568 - A. That specification deals with twist in each pair, twists between (amongst) the pairs, and color coding.

Other common digital and communications cables are Cat-3 (seldom used) and Cat 6 which is designed for 1000 Mega bit per second (Gigabit Ethernet)

Normally, out of the 4 pairs, (Blue, Orange, Green, Brown) only the blue conductors are used for telephones. Be it a 4 wire jack (RJ-11) or an 8 wire jack (RJ-45) the blue wires connect to the center two conductors on the jack and plug. It is possible to have 4 phones on a single Cat 5 conductor.

For digital communications on an RJ-45: Ethernet protocol (most commonly used) uses Blue and Orange pair (first two conductors and center two conductors.) Token Ring protocol (very uncommon anymore) uses Blue and Green pair (center 4 conductors)

If you live in Canada, YMMV, due to an old color code specification for wiring up wall outlets for computers and phones.

Reply to
Phil Again

Cat-5 cable has 4 twisted pairs.

On my cable the pairs use the colors of orange, green, blue, and brown. Each pair has one solid color wire and one with a white stripe. For computer networks, these are connected to 8-position connectors. Phone plugs fit into these jacks and are centered.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd

Don&#39;t do it. A 6 position connector is not properly supported in an 8 position jack and it will be a shaky connection. A sideways pull might even break the lock tab off.

Reply to
gfretwell

Cat 5 is 4 twisted pairs, just like cat 3 ( but different twist) I&#39;d pull cat 5 or cat 6 for phone and data, and special &#39;stat cable.

Reply to
clare

typical install is to use the oranges for the primary, and the blues for a second line when using cat 5 for phones. The "4 pair telephone cable" you mention would typically be cat 3 or 4 and has mostly been replaced by cat 5 so not as many spools need to be carried by installers.

s
Reply to
Steve Barker

it actually works just fine. A sideways pull *may* break the wire also in an rj-11 jack. There&#39;s all kinds of risks in life. Best way is just to not have a sideways pull at all.

s
Reply to
Steve Barker

Well, it sounds reasonable, but I think they did this, just to confuse me. They&#39;re very sneaky.

Thanks for all the replies.

Reply to
mm

Bell System practice is blue white is line 1, orange white is line 2.

Reply to
gfretwell

As long as you can tolerate a noisy connection, go for it

Reply to
gfretwell

Once you get above a small number of conductors such as the two conductor used for say a bell door push or certain types of low voltage thermostat wiring, or the typical four wires in telco, wiring (Red, green, black, yellow) the use of which vary slightly through out North America but where red and green are &#39;usually&#39; the telephone pair;

A standard communication colour coding was/is based on something along the lines below.

Pair # 1 Main wire colour =3D Blue Mate&#39; wire colour =3D White; or if the first wire is solid blue, maybe a white wire with blue marking to identify it as &#39;other&#39; wire of the "Blue pair".

Pair # 2

Main =3D Orange Mate =3D White or similar to above.

Pair # 3

Main =3D Green Mate =3D White or similar .............

Pair # 4

Main =3D Brown Mate =3D White etc.

Pair # 5

Main =3D Slate (A sort of greyish blue). Mate =3D White etc.

From these five basic wiring colours, for which the Blue, Orange, Green, Brown, Slate, is engraved on the memory of anyone who ever did any detail work in traditional telecommunications; by varying the &#39;mate&#39; colours (Using, black, red,white, yellow etc. and by the bundles in which the groups are wrapped, huge cables of hundreds and thousands of combinations of pairs can be assembled.

Communication cables were/are arranged in pairs within different twists (called lays) each pair of wires having a different rate of turns so as to minimize coupling (called crosstalk) between the separate circuits. Cross talk can lead to overhearing (voice) and transmission errors (computer) so it&#39;s best to get it right before choosing installing or closing an any wiring. Usually not a problem when wiring domestically.

But just to give a very simple example; even though each cable pair has very high isolation from adjacent wires and pairs carrying similar signals, one would not put a loudspeaker circuit carrying up to say 50 to 100 watts on music peaks (quintuple that for &#39;young&#39; music aficionados?) into the same cable being used for a low level microphone or telephone circuit where the level is one or two mill- iwatts (thousandths of a watt) or less. The 10,000 to one ratio of 100 watts to 1x10 to minus 3 watts could be a problem!

Reply to
terry

Ya, i got it backwards. ( and so is my install on my house ) orange, blue, who cares. ? two wires is two wires. LMAO!

s
Reply to
Steve Barker

Glad you clarified that, I&#39;ve been using Blue-Orange-Green-Brown, for years now, not that it matters, at least for a single phone, but when multiple lines are being used, it&#39;s certainly easier to determine which line is which

Reply to
RBM

That&#39;s interesting, all the Cat5 I&#39;ve ever installed uses the orange and green pairs for data and the blue and brown pairs for a second data channel or for PoE "Power over Ethernet". One good reason to run Cat5 or better is that a lot of phone technology is turning to VoIP. Future home phones will probably all plug into a common network with everything else. I install a lot of phone systems and I like to use the Northern Telecom systems because they work off a single pair. In the good old days the business phone systems I installed required a 25 or 50 pair cable per phone, GEEZ the labor!

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas

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