Cat5 To Every Room of the House

This is a pictorial of my experiences installing cat5 cable runs to each room of the house.

I've always wanted to have high quality cat5 run to all the phones. There is nothing as annoying as having two phone lines and having them exhibit so much crosstalk that one might as well have gotten 3-way calling instead.

I also wanted to be able to connect the laptop computer to the ethernet from any room.

This was the beginning of the great cat5 project; an attempt to simultaneously test my ability to walk on fiberglass covered 2x6's without falling through the ultra-thin "California-special" sheetrock ceilings, and my fortitude at ignoring the growing collection of spiderwebs accumulating on my sweatshirt, hair and beard.

Preparation:

Belden Datatwist-350 24 gauge solid cat5 spool (1000 ft.). The really nice wire doesn't cost that much more than the cheap stuff. Don't scrimp here.

A number of faceplates and cat5 RJ-45's and cat3 RJ-12's I used the Unicom brand of jacks, mostly because they had a 6-jack outlet plate available. Unfortunately the Unicom faceplates are butt-ugly, so I ended up buying some Global Data Supply faceplates for the 2-jack and 4-jack faceplates.

Installation:

The most important thing to stress about good cable is it is delicate. You shouldn't abuse it by stepping on it, kinking it or pulling it too hard. The cited Belden cable has a pretty slippery outer sheath. This makes pulling it fairly easy. Just pull with a low but steady force. It will follow you nicely. If pulling it starts to require too much force, do it in two sections. Build up a pool of extra cable at the point where you feel it getting too stiff. This will also be a test of your estimation abilities.

I started off by cutting two outlet holes near a stud in my computer room. I just measured the distance the electrical outlets were above the floor and cut this outlet hole to match that height.

Now it was time to figure out where to drill the drop hole in the attic. First I measured the distance of this stud to the window frame. Then I went outside and measured the same window edge to the garage door frame. I then went inside the garage and measured the garage door frame to the garage wall. Since this garage wall extended all the way to the attic I now had enough information to find the right set of studs in the attic to drill the drop to the computer room outlets.

I drilled a 1" hole in the center of the horizontal 2x4's above the outlet. You'll really want to drill this hole near the center of the 16" span so that you'll have the greatest change of avoiding any nails. Hitting a nail with a 1" spade wood bit will do a good number on it. The horizontal 2x4's will most likely be doubled up, so you'll need a drill that can drill at least a 4" deep hole.

I then dropped approximately 8 ft. worth of a steel fish tape down the wall. Taped to the fish tape was a 20 ft. section of 200 lb. nylon line. I tied off this line both in the attic and in the computer room. At the 10 ft. midpoint of this line I tied off a loop. This was the "shuttle". To pull a cable I'd pull the shuttle down into the computer room and tape it to the end of the cat5 cable. I'd then go into the attic and pull the shuttle back up.

In my case, I had a fairly straight shot from the attic above the computer room to any other part of the house. The only caveat was that I tried to run the cables near attic walls so as to minimize the chance that they'd get stepped on. For the ethernet cat5 I also avoided running it parallel to any power lines. I always kept it at least one stud distance away from power and only crossed power lines at fairly oblique angles.

To drop the cable down to an awaiting outlet just drill a 1/2" hole in the horizontal 2x4's. Don't be cheap and drill only a 1/4" or 3/8" hole. It won't be long before you want to run a few more cables and then the 2x4 will start looking like swiss cheese. I found that a 1/2" hole for the drop into the 2-receptacle rooms was just about right. For the computer room and the demarc drops 1" seemed to be just right. Dropping the cable down an interior wall didn't really require any fish tape. I just dropped the cable and reached into the outlet hole and pulled the cable out.

In the cases where I was upgrading the old "quad" phone wire and jack I used the old 4-wire quad to pull a 20 ft. nylon line up the wall. I then played the shuttle game and pulled the cat5 down using this nylon line.

The outlet boxes are really designed for electrical work. As such they are designed with stiff 14/3 or 12/3 in mind. You really shouldn't use the box's 4 wire retaining flaps in the back to hold the cat5 into place. The pressure these exert is much too high, and it will deform the cat5 causing a nice impedence spike at that point. I solved the exiting the box problem by cutting a nice large hole in the top rear section of the box.

Wiring:

Wiring the cat5 jacks is straight forward. Just strip back 3" of outer sheath, undo the wire pairs, match up the colors, put a nice 1/4" radiused turn to the wires and seat the wires using the clear plastic cap. There should not be more than a 1/4" gap between the stripped outer sheath and the termination point for the green and brown pairs. After punching in the wires, check the colors once more, taking close note of the band on each of the white wires. You do not want to mistakenly mix up the white wires of the different pairs. This final check is why you wanted such long "tails" on the wires. Now take a pair of flush-cutting diagonals and cut off the wire tails.

The 66-block is only used for the telephone wires which all terminate in RJ-12 jacks. All the ethernet runs go directly from one RJ-45 jack to another RJ-45 jack.

Wiring the 66-block is a bit tricky. It's not really designed for wiring lots of phones to the same set of incoming lines, so a bit of creativity is called for. I chose to use the outer connectors on both sides of the block for all the cat5 cables, both the incoming phone lines and the outgoing runs to the phone jacks. The center connectors were reserved for the jumpers. This way putting in more jumpers and using a cut-off bit with a punchdown tool is is unlikely to damage the cat5 cables. The lines from the demarc came in on one piece of cat5 that I punched-into the top left position. The rest of the cat5 that went to the various rooms of the house were punched-in in a counter clockwise fashion directly beneath the entrance cat5. I wired the block in telco wire order. The white wire of the pair comes before the colored wire. The pairs were all punched-in in telco color order; blue, orange, green, brown. I used a 4 ft. long piece of blue/white and orange/white to daisy-chain the first and second phone lines to all required RJ-12 jacks. I didn't want to jump the gun and punch in the second line to jacks that wouldn't have 2-line phones yet. The standard phone cord from the jack to the phone isn't twisted pair, so this would have caused unnecessary crosstalk. It's best to only punch in lines as you really need them.

Conclusions:

Pulling cat5 in residential houses is fun once, but I'd hate to do it for a living. ;-)

Spiders get much more bummed about you walking through their webs then you'll ever be.

Fiberglass doesn't wash off of clothes worth crap. Wear something that you won't mind burning afterwards.

Reference:

Since I get this question a lot, here is the order of the wires on a 66-block and the conversion to the green/red/black/yellow color wires.