How ?!
Chasing the wall out is the easy bit (SDS gouge !) but do I put into thin conduit (there's about 6 wired to get in) and plaster over, how do I keep in place whilst I plaster ?
Any help appeeciated.
Thanks
Paul.
Hi
I use galvanised clout nails (as used for shed felt) overlapped with the edges if its capping.
For conduit (which I've found less use for) I've used 40mm sheradised pins knocked in at an angle to hold it just enough to plaster over.
I'd also consider using dabs of GripFix or something similar to glue it in place if there was a longer length.
HTH IanC
Hello Zymurgy
Up to you. The plaster won't hurt it, and it's not mains nor gas nor water, so it won't hurt anyone if you drill into it.
Dabs of plaster every few inches. Or masonry nails if you'll be leaving it for a while.
True but thing of the agro trying to repair it...
Steel capping is cheap and easy to fit. Though to be honest for LV stuff like this I'd be looking at a larger duct, say 3" square in a hidden corner somewhere even if it extends cable runs considerably. 'Cause as sure as eggs is eggs something will need to be changed or added in the next 10 years.
Great, thanks for the advice, however after gouging a sample out. the plaster is only 10mm thick, so there'll be very little covering it when I plaster over.
Is there any mileage in going through the first course and threading the wires down the cavity ? I don't think theres much chance in going down through the plaster, as theres no space for conduit, so i'd have to plaster over the 'bare' wires.
I may just go wireless !!
Cheers
Paul.
Tack it in place with cable clips and simply plaster over the lot.
Steel capping is not that thick you should have a couple of mm over the top, ample. Anyway you have an SDS cutting a shallow grove in the wall under the plaster shouldn't be a problem. What is the wall made of? Probably block, very soft and easy to cut.
Generally wires should not be in the cavity. It's quite easy for them to form a damp bridge or feed any vermin that get in. Anyway shouldn't that cavity be filled with insulation. Threading stuff through the insulation could vary from fun to impossible.
I wouldn't, cable is cheap, fast, secure and reliable. You can also feed other signals down Cat5, like telephones, audio, video etc.
Hello Dave
But chance of it happening is pretty small, especially if you're still living there and wired properly. (No bends, verticals to visible point etc)
F'sure, but I expect it to still be using copper (fibre being a maybe for commercial properties) so just swapping the connectors and leaving the wiring in situ should be ok for most upgrades.
Hell, I'm still using Coax for my LAN here. It works!
Assuming that the format of the copper is correct. Mind you you can't go far wrong with the good old twisted pair, almost anything can be made to travel over that, audio, video, data, POTS, ISDN etc etc
At 10Mbps? 100Mbps is "standard" now, it does make a noticeable difference. I expect Gigabit stuff will be "standard" inside 5 years. How far Gigabit, that expects Cat6 cable, will go on a bit of old Cat5 (not Cat5e) might be interesting but I'd expect it to work over "domestic" lengths of at most afew tens of metres.
Dave, I'm looking into this at the moment (currently got a hard-wired set-up in one room) and am moving to another property, which currently has 2 cable connections (1 in livingroom and one in diningroom/sittingroom). I want to have my PC's upstairs but use the connection in the diningroom. Ideally I'd like to plug the cable modem into the transmitter and have only that downstairs (with the PC we use as a router on the other end of it), but could also go with having the router PC downstairs in the dining room plugged into the cable modem and then into the wi-fi.
What wireless network are you using, can you advise on how much it might cost for connections for 3 PC's? Should this be useable upstairs?
Cheers!
If you have a cable modem (with an Ethernet interface) then you need a cable router/WiFi AP.
I have just bought
I also bought a pair of USB adapters
I favour USB adapters because you can position them to get the best signal.
So roughly £50 for the AP/router, (3* £25) = £75 for 3 adapters gives you £125 for a 3 PC setup.
Should be O.K. with the AP downstairs and the PCs upstairs but YMMV - each house is different.
Note that this is a budget router so it doesn't have a serial port for low level configuration and AFAIK doesn't have a CLI via Telnet either. This means that if you can't do what you want via the web interface you are snookered.
Having said that, if your needs are straightforward this seems a great little router. For the price you get: all the router basics including NAT, DHCP, DNS. wireless LAN with 128 bit WEP and MAC address filtering wired LAN with 4 port 100Mb hub.
Other places to go: alt.internet.wireless NG which is always helpful.
HTH Dave R
Indeed. After an exploratory vertical chase, I pulled off the skirting and chased horizontally to the corner.
Then I went out and bought a reel of Cat-5e.
I'll put a vertical conduit in the corner where no-one will notice.
Thanks for the lateral thinking !
Cheers,
Paul.
Hello Dave
Indeed, and with wireless everything now so cheap, it's getting harder to justify wiring, imo. Just need a rx/tx widget in each room and everything in it talks to that.
Are computerised houses coming more popular? Don't hear much of them.
Ack, but 10 "works" fast enough for my purposes. :)
I don't know of a single wireless tx/rx widget that will do video, audio, LAN, POTS and ISDN. Several wireless widgets yes but some share the same frequency band (2.4Ghz) and that is getting really rather crowded and speed/reliabilty are real issues.
Define computerised? Nearly all larger domestic white goods have a microcontroller inside now, dsihwashers, washing machines, uWaves, heating controllers etc. They don't talk to each other yet though, with the advent of things like Bluetooth I wonder how long it will be before they do but is there and real need?
300bps modems where fast enough at one time, thats how I started this computer comms lark back in the late '80s. I now have a 100Mbps net connection... (Well thats the speed into the WAN NIC, there is an RF bottle neck which reduces the throughput to around 1Mbps in practice).
No it's not - a wired link will always be better.
Yes, the new building regs requiring conduit to be installed in new houses for Internet access should just be coming into force as the last of the LAN cabling completely vanishes ;-) Yes, you guessed it, that's yet another stunning comedy show by the office of the deputy prime minister...
Personally, I will stick with wired LAN links for the foreseable future, but I doubt most people will.
Depends quite what you mean, but mine is. The family finds it quite amusing when they visit me that, for instance, the landing light comes on automatically if you walk out of one of the bedrooms and it's dark outside, and at Christmas time, the fairy lights on the tree go off when there's no one in the room to see them [catch fire].
Always be better? Even if your requirements are to connect from across a busy street? Or to connect from the bottom of the garden? Wireless is perfectly acceptable for most domestic users this year - there will be a minority with more complex needs but "always better"?
Sir, methinks you are a Troll!
Dave R
Hello Dave
I said "imo", and it is. yo is obviously different, neither is set in stone. We're theorising what might happen in ten years' time - it's better to be a bit vague I think, rather than state what's true now and ignore any chance for it to change.
Tell you what, ask me again in ten years and I might agree with you. :)
Wireless networking is good and useful technology, no question, even with the incompetence of the security surrounding it - that's another story.
However at the lower cost end of the market, with 802.11b (11Mbit gross, 3-5Mbit net if you are lucky), the speed may well not be good enough for some applications such as video or high speed visualisation which may well become consumerised in the next few years. Even the newer 802.11g stuff which is purported to be 5x faster may not be that adequate.
Also, all of these technologies at present are shared medium - you are creating what amounts to be a hub. If all you want to do or foresee doing is sharing a "broadband" connection at today's speeds and perhaps a printer, and you want to do it at home or small office, then this will be OK. If you are doing file sharing or other server based things, then probably not. I think that the home server is likely to be an increasingly popular concept over the next few years, and with some of the suggested functionality, low speed networks may become a problem.
If you view that the sub £100 prices per node are OK and that you will upgrade by replacement, then it's a reasonable position to take, but wireless technology is changing pretty fast in comparison to wired systems.
Radio spectrum space at usable frequency ranges for the application may become the limiting factor.
.andy
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