Home ethernet wire install - need couple of advice thx.

[Edgy]

Greetings.

Am currently in process of remodeling parts of my home and would like some additional advice on home ethernet wiring after having read quite a bit of information on the internet. First, the background.

Materials - Cat6 cables, keystone jack/plate for wall installs, gigabit switch, and no patch panel (maybe at a later time).

Home - 2000 sq ft single story home with 4 bedroom.

Plan - 1 x line per bedroom (so total 4 lines) + 1 x line to kitchen + 3 x line to living room.

Need advice on:

* Rough guesstimation on how many feet of ethernet cable to buy (don't wanna buy 1000ft and end up using only half).
* Where to get some good deals on ethernet cables, jack/plates, and maybe some coax lines (thinking of doing coax at the same time for OTA HD w/antenna on roof and cable/satelite TV).

Much appreciate.

 

[Eug]

Make it 2 lines per bedroom, just because. Buy 1000 feet in a pull box. If you have 500 feet left over, then you can just sell it on eBay. However, if you run 2 lines per bedroom, you probably won't have 500 feet left over.

If you have some trades working in your home, it might actually make sense to run the multiple lines in different routes. I had one electrician cut one line to my living room, and I had one gas fitter burn the plastic off another line.

You can buy CAT6 keystone jacks and wall plates at Monoprice for cheap. Or you can get it at your local electrical supply store. If you you're buying from Monoprice, pick up a 12-24 port CAT6 patch panel while you're at it. They're not expensive at all, and are actually cheaper than buying the corresponding number of keystone jacks. Some can be mounted right on the wall. No need for a rackmount.

P.S. If you can find a good deal on top notch CAT5e, that's fine too, since most of the cheap CAT6 on eBhey is noname low end stuff. Both should work fine for Gigabit but I'm not sure that cheap CAT6 is necessarily any better than high quality CAT5e.

 

[seepy83]

Buy a patch panel. There's no good reason to do this without a patch panel.

How many feet of cable do you need? Well that depends on how you're running the cable. You know the floorplan of your house better than anyone on the Internet will. You'll need to run them horizontally to the correct location above or below a wall, and vertically through the walls (depending on the location of your patch panel, the layout of your house, and where you have access to run cables, you might need to go all the way from the basement to the attic and then back down a wall to the location of the jack). Measure it all out, and have a gameplan for how you want to run the cables.

 

[Edgy]

Eug - advice on patch panel well received... didn't consider the cost of keyjacks on wires going into the switch at all, duh..

seepy83 - the house is basically 2x bedroom at each end (total 4 bedrooms) with living room in middle right and dining room + kitchen in the middle left of the house

Haven't decided on central location of patch panel yet but since all phone/electricity/cable wiring comes via telephone pole in the back yard, I'm thinking near the main power panel outside the house in the back instead of the garage (which is in front of the house).

As to running the wires, my electrician who's replacing all switches and wiring for lighting for the entire house (since it's very old) is gonna run the networking and coax for me at the same time plus all the wall install as long as I provide the keystone jacks and wall plates.

 

[Eug]

Uh oh. Electricians often like running networking in parallel to electrical. This is not so good for networking signal integrity. You might want to ask him what his plans are.

Are your walls open? If so, and if your electrician isn't giving you a reasonable answer re: the paths of the networking runs, then you could theoretically run the CAT5e/6 yourself.

 

[frowertr]

Uh oh. Electricians often like running networking in parallel to electrical. This is not so good for networking signal integrity. You might want to ask him what his plans are.

Are your walls open? If so, and if your electrician isn't giving you a reasonable answer re: the paths of the networking runs, then you could theoretically run the CAT5e/6 yourself.

This.

Your electrician won't care about not running your network cableing parrallel to your electical lines unless you stress that fact.

 

[Edgy]

Walls are not open - the wire running will be through attic then down the closed off walls in each room.

Haven't discussed running the electrical and ethernet together in parallel...

I'll make sure with him before he runs them but I am reasonably sure he's experienced even with running ethernet lines enough to know this.

Reason is that we discussed the contingency where he cannot find a good place in the wall to put the line through to a good location without opening up the wall sections.

That to me sounds like he'll run ethernet separately but I'll make sure and confirm with him.

Thx for advice.