Wired
This weekend I laid down a serious amount of wire.
A coworker came over on Saturday to help me fish the wire into the living room (2 cat-5e, 2 cat-6, and 2 coax 3GHz RG-6 which is actually cat-5 coax), which took about 20 minutes once I got out the saws-all and cut a hand sized hole into the I-beam that was blocking my view of the drill bit.
On Sunday I fished more of the same into my master bedroom so that every room will have the same capacity. I'm currently using one coax for cable and one cat-5e line for ethernet. I have no idea what I'll do with all that wire, but fishing cat-6 wires seemed to make more sense than fiber-optical, and it should future-proof my house for quite some time. Well, if I ever switch to DSS, I'll be able to have dual channels in every room. DirecTiVo everywhere!
I wish I had floor trusses rather than I-beams. Pulling wires through the randomly spaced punch out holes in the I-beams is painfully slow. You can't pull a large quantity of wire from point A to point B. You have to pull it in lots of little runs because the friction is just too great, and the wires have a tendency to knot up. This makes pulling the wire take about four times longer than it otherwise should.
I also ran a coax line and a cat-5e cable out to the cable box to replace the original cable coming into the house and the cat-5e means that I'll be able to support 4 phone lines -- should I ever actually call the phone company and get phone service. If you're going to go into the attic when it's -5F up there to run one wire, you might as well run as many as you can! I couldn't come up with a reason to run cat-6 to the garage or attic though, so I didn't.
Well, that's two rooms down, and five left. Unfortunately three of those rooms will require me to go back into the attic. I'll probably wait to do them until spring when temps in the attic will be more pleasant.
A coworker came over on Saturday to help me fish the wire into the living room (2 cat-5e, 2 cat-6, and 2 coax 3GHz RG-6 which is actually cat-5 coax), which took about 20 minutes once I got out the saws-all and cut a hand sized hole into the I-beam that was blocking my view of the drill bit.
On Sunday I fished more of the same into my master bedroom so that every room will have the same capacity. I'm currently using one coax for cable and one cat-5e line for ethernet. I have no idea what I'll do with all that wire, but fishing cat-6 wires seemed to make more sense than fiber-optical, and it should future-proof my house for quite some time. Well, if I ever switch to DSS, I'll be able to have dual channels in every room. DirecTiVo everywhere!
I wish I had floor trusses rather than I-beams. Pulling wires through the randomly spaced punch out holes in the I-beams is painfully slow. You can't pull a large quantity of wire from point A to point B. You have to pull it in lots of little runs because the friction is just too great, and the wires have a tendency to knot up. This makes pulling the wire take about four times longer than it otherwise should.
I also ran a coax line and a cat-5e cable out to the cable box to replace the original cable coming into the house and the cat-5e means that I'll be able to support 4 phone lines -- should I ever actually call the phone company and get phone service. If you're going to go into the attic when it's -5F up there to run one wire, you might as well run as many as you can! I couldn't come up with a reason to run cat-6 to the garage or attic though, so I didn't.
Well, that's two rooms down, and five left. Unfortunately three of those rooms will require me to go back into the attic. I'll probably wait to do them until spring when temps in the attic will be more pleasant.
posted by Mark at 10:05 PM
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