House Refurbishment - Networking house

LupoLover

LupoLover

LupoLover

Associate
Joined
15 Jul 2008
Posts
1,225
Ok Ladies and Gents

I recently bought a nice big house (Its a **** hole so no willy waving here), but I can make it into the perfect family home with some hard work (and I mean hard).
So I have started digging up the floors, yes serious stuff as underfloor heating the whole of downstairs.

So I have access to run some RJ45 cables!
I have just the usual Sky router in my study at min and doesn't reach back half of house or upstairs.

I will get a mesh network for wifi around house and was thinking of placing something in corridor upstairs in ceiling and also back of house in living room in ceiling. Should I take Cat6 to these places from my study? It seems that most just are all Wifi and no cables needed, but I like the idea of cabled ones (again am I being too fussy?)

I am a bit old school in thinking Cat6 to everything I can, still true or am I a bit mad? Where would you run Cat6 too? My thoughts are:

Cable through wall to outside on everywhere I want a security camera (POE)
Living room x 2 where TV will go (TV and a spare)
1 to each bedroom to roughly where TV will go?
Boiler room x 2 (Heating control maybe)
Air cupboard x 1 (Hot water tank) - Immersun maybe
Loft take a few just encase as can drop to upstairs rooms later if possible (Maybe PV inverter go up there)
Garage x 2 (Again PV or maybe a wifi box again)
Switch in study for all these Cables and in Study is Gaming PC, Xbox, PS4 etc.....

Any advice at all?
Do I use CAT6? CAT6se?

Sorry for soo many questions, but any advice you guys can give would be great

Thanks

Sheldon
 
Given the opportunity, I'd have Ethernet to every room excluding the bathroom.

Use Cat6 UTP.

Cable is cheap so for the bedrooms run pairs as a minimum and definitely have four or more in the living room.

Consider running cables to both sides of a room if there's any potential for the furniture to be rearranged.

Try to run the cables in a way that allows them to be added to or replaced in the future.
 
bremen1874 said:
Given the opportunity, I'd have Ethernet to every room excluding the bathroom.
Click to expand...

Did this. Ended up having to pull a feed to the adjoining cupboard for the smart mirror project, could have gone with wifi, but PoE makes life easier and wired = reliable.

Op, from experience also consider if you will make use of Balun's to stream video over ethernet, while you can now get not obscenely priced alternatives, but an HDMI splitter/matrix + Balun + single/dual unbroken ethernet cable is still one fo the cheaper/better methods to get AV piped round a home.
 
Avalon said:
Op, from experience also consider if you will make use of Balun's to stream video over ethernet, while you can now get not obscenely priced alternatives, but an HDMI splitter/matrix + Balun + single/dual unbroken ethernet cable is still one fo the cheaper/better methods to get AV piped round a home.
Click to expand...
Good advice here, run extra for potential video feeds. HDMI over ethernet solutions are now very reasonable and are a very neat way to pipe video feeds around.
 
Jez said:
HDMI over ethernet solutions are now very reasonable and are a very neat way to pipe video feeds around.
Click to expand...

Do people still contemplate HDMI over ethernet? With smart TV's and streaming sticks, i would have thought they'd give you much more control over what you can watch. Otherwise you're stuck watching the same source as other HDMI over ethernet runs? I just can't think of a use case where HDMI over ethernet is actually valuable.
 
Semple said:
Do people still contemplate HDMI over ethernet? With smart TV's and streaming sticks, i would have thought they'd give you much more control over what you can watch. Otherwise you're stuck watching the same source as other HDMI over ethernet runs? I just can't think of a use case where HDMI over ethernet is actually valuable.
Click to expand...

It is definitely diminishing, but we have historically used it for piping single source satellite around the house as the need for multiroom subs was not there for us. That and having a single point of recorded content, etc. The most seamless solution if you may not mind the source being the same.
 
LupoLover said:
I am a bit old school in thinking Cat6 to everything I can
Click to expand...

No, you're absolutely right. Cable everywhere. At least two ports in every room and six ports in your study and where the TV will go (1 for TV, 1 for DVR, 1 for BD player, 1 for set-top box, 1 for game console, 1 spare). Also set up ethernet points with POE for security cameras. And you will be wanting 10 Gbps ethernet sooner rather than later.

Top tips: different coloured cables for normal ethernet cables and PoE cables. Pull cables.
 
Thanks.

Your top tip - I just buy 305m drum (or 3) of CAT6 UTP and that will do for everything? (I dont need special cable for POE?)
All go back to study where I can put a big switch and where my incoming BT line is?

Cheers
 
Have a patch panel to keep it tidy and have separate switches for normal ethernet and PoE ethernet. You do need separate cables for PoE, not because the cables themselves are any different but so they can be a different colour. You can damage normal equipment if you attach a powered PoE cable to a normal device. Make it easy to not make a mistake!
 
An 802.3af or 802.3at PoE switch isn't going to damage anything. The switch will negotiate with the connected device before applying any power.

Passive PoE could be a problem.
 
Quartz said:
Have a patch panel to keep it tidy and have separate switches for normal ethernet and PoE ethernet. You do need separate cables for PoE, not because the cables themselves are any different but so they can be a different colour. You can damage normal equipment if you attach a powered PoE cable to a normal device. Make it easy to not make a mistake!
Click to expand...
As the guy above mentions, this isnt how (standardized) POE works, it negotiates as part of the standard before the power is fed. You might actively turn inline power off per port if a device has local power which is preferable for whatever reason, but this isnt something which you would normally do as standard.
 
LupoLover said:
Cheers mate. I will just put red tap on end,
Click to expand...

Don't do this! Tape comes off. It also makes the cable more difficult to track. I'm speaking from experience here! Do it right the first time. You're going to be spending tens of thousands on this job, so why stint over a few extra quid?

Jez said:
As the guy above mentions, this isnt how (standardized) POE works,
Click to expand...

ITYM how POE is supposed to work. Play safe. Make it easy to not make a mistake. Make it failure-resistant. Cable of a different colour is hardly an imposition, is it?
 
Quartz said:
ITYM how POE is supposed to work. Play safe. Make it easy to not make a mistake. Make it failure-resistant. Cable of a different colour is hardly an imposition, is it?
Click to expand...
Its not an imposition i agree, but equally i have never heard of this being a concern. My employers building for example has thousands of switches, feeding tens of thousands of outlets, they are all POE enabled unless we have a specific reason to switch power inline off. Its just not an issue :confused:

Fair enough though, it would also look neat to have them colour coded.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom