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We’ll be building a new house (our first building experience) this summer. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of questions regarding design and materials. Here’s the first. A fellow who just completed a house recommended having category 5 cable installed during rough-in. I’ve heard of this stuff on This Old House but don’t really know it’s benefits or detractions. Any comments?
Second, we’ll be moving to Auburn, Maine from Colorado, a big change. Does anyone know of builders in the area, good or bad? We’ve found one through our realtor but I’m just curious if there are any opinions. Once we get settled we’ll also like want to find a furniture maker for a few things. I’d like to do it myself but with a new job, new locale, new family my furniture making career is down on the list. Thanks.
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Jeff,
Here's a < Obsolete Link > mini-primer on wiring considerations. This link brings you into the middle of a segment on wiring.
Realize one thing. Wire is inexpensive to install now vs trying to run it later.
We've had quite a few other threads < Obsolete Link > (here's one) on this same subject. Several good ideas re: conduit, etc. Taunton's search function can be frustrating, but give it a shot.
Have fun.
*Keep cat 5 three feet from fluorescent fixtures, cross 110 at 90 degrees or keep 1 foot away. No kinks, two inch radius at bends, no periodic sags (like at joists), use preformed staples. Buy plenum cable (not the cheap stuff at ID) even if it is not in plenum. No more than 1/2" untwist at termination. Socket terminations can be bad outta the box.
*I see that no one really answered your questions about cat 5 wiring.CAT 5 cables are designed for computer networking (Ethernet). While they special characteristics are not needed they are also used for telephone wiring. Even with a single computer it is "networked" if it is connected to a cable modem or DSL modem.The general recommendation is that each room have 2 CAT 5 cables run. And for larger rooms or ones that you might want to use as an office that you run more. All of these are "home run" in that they go to a central location.Likewise it is recommended that 2 RG-6 cables be run for TV. using 2 allows sources, such as DVD or DISH to feed more than one TV.It has nothing to do with you power wiring (120/240).
*Bill summed it up well. Some other things to consider:The Cat5 cables should terminate in a central location...ideally near the phone line and cable tv where they enter your house and in a space where you could set up (and plug in) a router, hub, firewall and modem. I deally, this would be a nice large closet.While installing Cat5 certainly is easy and is convenient, the trend today is moving away from wires and going wireless. You can now network your home over wireless ethernet quite easily. Not that you shouldn't install cat5, but it is something you can consider.If you do install Cat5, I'd send it to each bedroom, the kitchen and family/living room.
*Amen, Mongo! ...."Realize one thing. Wire is inexpensive to install now vs trying to run it later."Second this BIG TIME. You never know what the future will bring. Built house I'm living in now in '71, was given Mongo's advice 30 years ago and put in control wire bus with 50 pair to each room, multiple outlet circuits, multiple coax, even 1/4" pneumatic control lines a lot of places, multiple wire pairs to doors and windows for alarms, etc. -- over 4 miles of control/comm wire. Even installed some extra unused dry plumbing. I DID NOT put in nearly enough, and have had to string more over the years.I'd even consider installing fiber optic cable to all 4 corners of every room (along with dedicated run of 120VAC) in a new home.
*Sheesh Art B, what are running there, some type of mad scientist lab?... I think the basics have been covered fairly well. However, just to add a couple of things. Category 5 wiring is unshielded twisted pair communications cable usually made up of 4 twisted pairs of 22 or 24 gauge solid copper wires. The Category 5 specifications were designed for transmission speeds of 1 to 100 Mhz. As has been mentioned, these cables can be used for computer networking or plain old telephone service. The older Category 3 wiring was of similar construction and, I believe, simply had fewer twists per foot which only allowed a maximum of transmission speed of something over 10mhz (possibly 25mhz, I can't remember for sure). Category 3 cable was an improvement over the older "station wire" telephone wire that was commonly used before the advent of networking. For telephone service, the connections using the RJ connectors are pretty forgiving. For 10Mhz Ethernet networks, somewhat more care needs to be paid to termination and the crimping of connectors. For 100Mhz Ethernet networks, high grade connectors are needed and care must be taken that the pairs are untwisted as little as possible when inserted into the connectors (1/2" of untwist or less). Networks running at 100mhz should be tested for transmission quality as it is possible to achieve a working network that is considerably below its design maximum but in which the lowered performance is not readily apparent.There are lots of opinions on how best to prepare for future needs. Copper wire transmission technology keeps improving. Standards for Category 6 and Category 7 communications wiring are either being finalized or are already out. The design specifications for these cables are 250mhz for cat 6 and 800 mhz for cat 7. Category 7 shielded wiring should be more than adequate for broadband television once all the ancillary connectors and equipment is available. There seems to be less and less need for installing fiber optic cables to the desktop, particularly with the high cost of connecting the cables. While they may do it on high speed graphics workstation, I have not seen anyone running optical cables "the last yard" to the end user. What I plan on doing is wiring my place with all the wiring I think I will need in the foreseeable future and do it in the conventional fashion. I will then run a couple of conduits to places where an upgrade may possibly be wanted in the future (the pairs of conduits allowing the separation of power cables and communications cables). While there is talk of networking everything from your coffee maker to your refrigerator, the deployment of wireless networking technology such as Bluetooth (named after an ancient Danish king, I believe) may obviate the need for hard wiring. However, there is some question as to whether there will be sufficient bandwidth available to support everything under the sun being networked by wireless, so I still plan on having a lot of good old cat 5 cabling in my kitchen, laundry room, den, and other places. Happy wiring...
*JeffWe are also building a new home, in British Columbia. I am running two 1" conduits to each room. I feel this is the best way to go for me as I can run the cat. 5 in this, and if things change in the future I can pull something else thru at that time. Also might be doing this because I'm a plumber and its the pipe thing (easy and familiar) Good Luck with your project
*You're probably not thinking of selling your new house, but it's good equity (locale dependent, of course) and relatively inexpensive at this stage....imho.
*The important thing is not what you put in now but that you installed in such a manner that you can easily upgrade in the future, such as using conduit to each location.In my day job we have upgraded everything to minimum cat 5 and recently 5e and lastly cat 6 which has no official standards yet, but it is all in conduit. We have multi buildings and thousands of desktop outlets. We also have had fiber to the desktop for over 10 years but have very seldom used it. We have fiber across town and use a lot of wireless but there is not enough band space for everybody to have wireless without interference. My own personal hookup at home is a cable modem and it is about a fast as I can see or think so I am not going to get too excited about the latest whippy method. I guess that is why my stereo speakers in the livingroom are behind a grill cloth in a bookcase cabinet but still mounted in the original cardboard box they came in. A little kitchen knife and some 6/32 screws and nuts and wala.. a bass reflex baffle!!
*Thanks for all the advice. Just a few more things. What I'm getting is that the Cat 5 is telecom cable. Would the house have a separate cable for phones (email is great but now and then you need to actually speak to a person on the other end)? It seems then that each room would have electric wire (to plug everything in), a line for phones, a line for computers (to talk to each other in the house), and a line for speakers for music. Am I right in thinking that the computer cables could end in a home box that contains one modem to communicate to the outside? As well, the concept then applies to TV signals from cable or satellite, having it come into the house in one location and then feeding TVs throughout? I particularly like the conduit idea. Hopefully the electricians are familiar with this. Since we're starting fresh it makes sense to make the house as updated and updatable as possible. Thanks.
*CAT 5 cable can work fine for telephone. While you don't need all of the bandwidth that is available with cat 5 cables for use as telephone wiring, it will serve the same function as the older style "station wire" and will give you the flexability of using it for computer networking if you decide to later. While the cat-5 cable might cost a tiny bit more than station wire, the added flexibility allowed with cat-5 is well worth the slight additional cost and most people just do all telephone and computer cabling with cat-5.Hooking up to a modem is a different matter. You can't just hook any number of computers up to a single modem and expect anything to happen. Normally, modems are made to hook up to only one device. If that device is a single computer, then things can work. If the device hooked to the modem is a router, then the router can sort out where all of the incoming messages (or actually "packets" in Ethernet networking lingo) should go in regard to which computer. The common method these days appears to be to hook a computer to the modem and then equip that computer with a program that shares the internet connection with the other computers on the network. Given the malicious idiots that want to commandeer your computer to do all sorts of other malicious things to other computers, it is becoming increasingly wise to also adapt this "gateway" computer with a "firewall" that will screen out most of the people wanting to mess with your computers. There are several packages available that will allow you set up such a system with minimal knowledge. I have not yet done this, but most of popular computing magazines have recently run articles on these firewall programs. Thus you could "homerun" your network cables (also terms a "star" topology in networking) to one location and that location could have either a router or a common gateway computer attached to the modem (and hopefully with a firewall).BTW, "telecom" means "telecommunications" which generally refers to both telephone at the low end and computer networking communication at the high end. Most of the unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cables will work fine for UTP applications which have a lower bandwidth requirement. Thus cat-5 will work fine for 100mhz networking as well as 10mhz networking and telephone use. Cat-3 would work for 10mhz and telephone but not 100mhz networking. Station wire is suitable for only telephone connections (or some old Appletalk networks if anyone still has those...)
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We'll be building a new house (our first building experience) this summer. I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions regarding design and materials. Here's the first. A fellow who just completed a house recommended having category 5 cable installed during rough-in. I've heard of this stuff on This Old House but don't really know it's benefits or detractions. Any comments?
Second, we'll be moving to Auburn, Maine from Colorado, a big change. Does anyone know of builders in the area, good or bad? We've found one through our realtor but I'm just curious if there are any opinions. Once we get settled we'll also like want to find a furniture maker for a few things. I'd like to do it myself but with a new job, new locale, new family my furniture making career is down on the list. Thanks.