Any purpose of a house intercom?

[steppinthrax]

I bought a house around a year ago (built in the 80s). For some reason the house has an intercome system. There's a Nutone Master station on the lobby and each room (even the bathroom) has these white nutone speaker stations. The house is roughly 3K sq ft. What are some of the ways to re-purpose this system, is there really any purpose.

 

[Fritzo]

I use ours all the time. My son has selective hearing, so you can make SURE he hears you call for dinner with that thing

The wires are usually cat3 or cat5 in those things. You may be able to use the wiring for ethernet and hook up an extra access point or something if needed.

 

[steppinthrax]

I use ours all the time. My son has selective hearing, so you can make SURE he hears you call for dinner with that thing

The wires are usually cat3 or cat5 in those things. You may be able to use the wiring for ethernet and hook up an extra access point or something if needed.

It's actually a ribbon cable, almost like speaker wire but with four conductors

 

[Gooberlx2]

The previous owners of my parents' home put such a system in. In the several years I lived there, we never used it...ever. If you can re-purpose the existing wiring for something else, I highly recommend it.

 

[Red Storm]

I know in our house it let's you talk to whoever is at the front door from any room in the house. There's also a CD player attached to the main unit, so you could load up a song (or radio station) to play through the whole house.

 

[KidNiki1]

we used to have a very old intercom system in my parents house. i used it to have the radio on in the whole house when everyone else was gone. best thing to do with it if you have that option.
as kids, my brothers and i just used to turn the volume down when our parents tried to use it to talk to us in our rooms and then claim we didnt know how that happened. :sneaky:

 

[Fritzo]

It's actually a ribbon cable, almost like speaker wire but with four conductors

Ah..those are the really old ones. The newer ones just share the house's existing phone wiring.

You could cut the cables and use it for speaker wire, making for a while house stereo

 

[waggy]

I know in our house it let's you talk to whoever is at the front door from any room in the house. There's also a CD player attached to the main unit, so you could load up a song (or radio station) to play through the whole house.

same. my parents had one that had a CD/stereo system that you could listen in every room. my mom would blast it while cleaning.

 

[FoBoT]

you gotta remember that in the 'olden days' no one had a cell phone, let alone everyone in a household having a wireless handheld device for communications

 

[Lyfer]

To serve as the same purpose as fruit baskets have? (that no one eats and rots away)

 

[NetWareHead]

My old house had one of these systems too. The cool feature about it was that the doorbells would ring on all of these stations so you wouldnt miss anyone at the door. You could also do a voice-down to the front door intercom and see who was there from any room of the house.

 

[sactoking]

Because lots of '80s sitcoms had them so if you wanted to be cool like Webster or Mr. Belvedere or Silver Spoons you had to have an intercom.

 

[sdifox]

I just yell