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outdoor coax & phone cable management

N

NetWareHead

THAT guy
Not exactly sure how to phrase this but here goes. Redoing all the coax and phone cabling in my house. You can tell Comcast installers were here. Holes drilled straight through a wood floor to pass coax from the basement. Nothing is stapled or tacked up properly, some coax is just dangling from joists or wrapped around a heating pipe.

I'll pull all the old cable, run new lines to proper gang boxes in the walls. That will take care of the interior but my question more concerns the exterior and the cable penetrations. There is more than one penetration through the foundation which is mildly irritating. I'll pack the old ones with silicone caulk.

Ideally, when a future tenant orders cable TV service, comcast is going to roll up to the house, see the "demarc" outdoors, open it and connect the new line. They can then follow the line from the demarc to the tenant's coax splitter and then verify signal at each room. And then leave. Im trying to avoid further crappy cableing work and more needless holes drilled through my foundation.

Is there an outdoor "demarc" or somethign like that I could mount to the outside that a cable installer would readily see? Something to spec that they would accept working with and connecting to. Something big enough for 2 individual connections and a grounding block. Any suggestions are appreciated.
 
NetWareHead said:
Not exactly sure how to phrase this but here goes. Redoing all the coax and phone cabling in my house. You can tell Comcast installers were here. Holes drilled straight through a wood floor to pass coax from the basement. Nothing is stapled or tacked up properly, some coax is just dangling from joists or wrapped around a heating pipe.
Click to expand...

Ugh, that's what it's like for me too, and the lazy work really pisses me off. I've been working on rewiring my house too, and man... it really makes me wish that I would've built a house instead. 😛 I used these cable staples in the crawlspace for handling runs that had multiple wires in tandem, but instead of using a nail, I replaced it with these screws.

My biggest pain has mostly been with drilling holes. Since I needed to go through cinder block + brick to reach the location where the cable comes to, I ended up buying a newer hammer drill that actually supports SDS Plus instead of a normal chuck. That let me pick up an 18"-long drill bit. Although, most of my problems are coming from the hole that leads to the inside of the house. It's also through cement blocks, and I'd like to use some sort of pipe/conduit to make routing the wires easier (it's slightly off center from the wall plate position), but it's hard to find one that won't cause awful restrictions. I'm tempted to just use more than one hole at this point... especially since I know what spot is directly behind my wall plate position.

But it sounds like we both had the same idea: two individual external connections. I wouldn't have even considered it if I didn't know people with satellite TV + cable Internet.
 
Aikouka said:
Ugh, that's what it's like for me too, and the lazy work really pisses me off. I've been working on rewiring my house too, and man... it really makes me wish that I would've built a house instead. 😛 I used these cable staples in the crawlspace for handling runs that had multiple wires in tandem, but instead of using a nail, I replaced it with these screws.

My biggest pain has mostly been with drilling holes. Since I needed to go through cinder block + brick to reach the location where the cable comes to, I ended up buying a newer hammer drill that actually supports SDS Plus instead of a normal chuck. That let me pick up an 18"-long drill bit. Although, most of my problems are coming from the hole that leads to the inside of the house. It's also through cement blocks, and I'd like to use some sort of pipe/conduit to make routing the wires easier (it's slightly off center from the wall plate position), but it's hard to find one that won't cause awful restrictions. I'm tempted to just use more than one hole at this point... especially since I know what spot is directly behind my wall plate position.

But it sounds like we both had the same idea: two individual external connections. I wouldn't have even considered it if I didn't know people with satellite TV + cable Internet.
Click to expand...


What sort of hammer drill did you buy?

I like those cable staples, thanks.

Well my reasoning for running 2 connections is because it is for a 2 family house. Each tenant would get their own. But that is a good idea to run 2 cables for each tenant which would permit a cable TV provider supply internet and a dish for TV.
 
NetWareHead said:
What sort of hammer drill did you buy?
Click to expand...

I bought this one. It's a SDS Plus model that also comes with a free angle grinder. The only downside is that there may be a case for the drill, but there isn't one for the angle grinder. I do wish that SDS Max drills were a bit more affordable, because trying to drill a hole large enough to fit conduit/piping that can fit multiple wires requires something like 1.25"-1.5", but SDS Plus doesn't really go above 1". Although, if you need to do holes for a quad-shield RG6 cable (~.3" diameter), a good 3/8 drill bit (.375" diameter) will work for you.

NetWareHead said:
I like those cable staples, thanks.
Click to expand...

My only complaint is that I wish they had metal variants of them as they can feel a little flimsy. Although, I don't see any problem with them holding cables, and you can fit 2-3 QS-RG6 in one row.

NetWareHead said:
Well my reasoning for running 2 connections is because it is for a 2 family house. Each tenant would get their own. But that is a good idea to run 2 cables for each tenant which would permit a cable TV provider supply internet and a dish for TV.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it might not be a bad idea to do it now. The last thing you'd want is for a tenant to try to get satellite and some installer just drills through walls and such. Although, I'm having some trouble pushing the second cable through. Oddly enough, it's the one that came out straight on the other side, yet my cable seems to be jammed when I try to put it through. 😕 If it's any more of a pain, I could just drill a half-inch hole. 😛
 
Aikouka said:
My only complaint is that I wish they had metal variants of them as they can feel a little flimsy. Although, I don't see any problem with them holding cables, and you can fit 2-3 QS-RG6 in one row.
Click to expand...
If you put just one in a row, does it hold the coax snugly? I'm wondering if there will be sag and slippage over time.
 
boomerang said:
If you put just one in a row, does it hold the coax snugly? I'm wondering if there will be sag and slippage over time.
Click to expand...

I think it will be fine. I've only got the one run right now, and it seems to hold in place fairly well. I think that's mostly because each row is pretty much just big enough to handle QS-RG6. I've only had them in there for a few days, but when I went in last night (to install those #6 screws that I linked earlier), everything still looked just like I left it.
 
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