DIY advice please: Laying Cat5 between rooms

Bossk128

Bossk128

Bossk128

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OK, this is hardly an OCUK query but I don't know of a good DIY forum :D

I want to lay (semi)permanent Cat5 between my geek room and my living room. They are on the same floor but staggered doorways across a hallway. I can't go under the floorboards as there is a downstairs neighbour (or can I??), but the floor above is also ours, as is the loft (3 storey townhouse thing).

My immediate thought is to try and get the cable behind the skirting boards, which should be easy. However I've no idea how to cross the hallway! I think the proper way to do it is go up the inside of the plaster to the loft, cross over to the living room, then again drop down behind the plaster and out the skirting. However this seems to be a difficult and long (meteres) job!

Really, I don't want to break anything or have to do any redecorating. I certainly don't want to be drilling holes through underfloor joists. Is it possible? What is the norm?
 
The simplest way would be to just tack the cable up to the ceiling, across and back down. Depending on the cable and the colour of your walls this will either look fine or awful, if you tack it along the door frame as it goes up it will hardly be noticable. You can alway paint the cable afterwards.

Under the floorboards will be the neatest way but it is a pain, you either have to pull up a lot of floor or find some way of threading it through, if you are just doing it for the hallway though it might not be too bad. What flooring do you have in the hallway? Bare floor boards / laminate / carpet?

If you pull the skirting board up be careful if it is very old as sometimes it can bring away a load of plaster as well.
 
Thanks for the reply. Tacking the cable is also an option, but I think getting it through doorways will look messy. Currentkly it's blue cable, however for ease of install I'm happy to buy cream Cat5!

It's carpet in the hall, and wood laminate flooring (!) in both other rooms.
 
I'd tack it to the wall, run it under the carpet at the doorway (still running it along the wall- but under the carpet) then keep it tight against the wall when you hit the divider at the doorway to your living room.
 
When I did my house, I used trunking.

A Quick run down on my setup is

Phone line in Kitchen junction box, gets split there to one phone and to the living room, behind the fridges, up along the doorway, into the hallway around the door frame, and then into the living room up to the ceiling across the room and down.

This then goes into a wall socket that I mounted, and it has a Phone socket and a CAT5 socket. The phone socket goes to a splitter, the goes to a second phone and to the router.

The Ethernet goes from my PC to the socket's CAT5 hole, this then follows the phone line back into the hallway inside the trunking, however it then leaves teh phone line and travels along the ceiling onto the stairs, and around the stairs and by now its at the floor level of the top landing and it goes along the skirting and then up the door frame to the ceiling again, along there and then up into the loft.

The loft has been converted into a LAN game room where trhe ethernet cable then goes alonmgh the beam ( Now no longer in trunking - I see no need to hide it in there ) where it goes to another Wall mounted CAT5 Socket.

Connecged to the Socket is my switch, and from the switch the rest of the PCs are connected.

What I have in the end, is very close, to 500 feet of CAT5 Ethernet cable and about 120 feet of Telephone cable all going around my house and the only place it is showing, is in the corner in my living room where it goes out of the trunking and around teh door frame, and again when it goes from the ceiling of the downstairs to the floor of upstairs and again, this is only because I needed teh flexibility of lose cable. In both cases I have painted over the cable and unless you know it there you would never know.

The trunking, while white, is simply painted over and in fact its only paint thats holding all teh trunking up... I never bothered sticking it down or nailing it. This was a semi joke where I just plonked a load of pain into the corner of the room where the trunking was going to go, and I put the trunking in there and it was fairly tacky, and it held... I left it for abotu 30 minutes and I realised it was holding just fine. Its been there for about 6 years now and its been flawless. We have no wallpaper in teh living room, its only painted so we simply paint over it every year when we decorate, however, what I do, is take off the top/side of the trunking when the paint is dry so I dont cover it too much, just in case I need to have access to it.

End result is that you simply cannot see the cables and its flawless.

I should have not go on should I?
 
Your floorboards are not the downstairs ceiling. Rip them up (if practical) and lay it in the floor for best effect.

How long is the run?
 
If you're lucky like me you might have a nice big space between your plasterboard and brick work with only vertical batterns. If so, you can cut out a single gang box 74mm x 74mm, drill into the wall from the loft (very tricky to do and sometimes you burst through the ceiling instead which sucks) then you can ram cable rods down that hole and fish the end out of the box hole you cut. Another reason for cutting the box first is to make sure there isn't a battern in the way.
You could always hire an electrician though!
 
It's Friday!

The run is probably no more than 25m. I can't lift the floor boards due to tongue and groove wood flooring, but anyway, I'd have to go through the joists, no? That's not something I'd be prepared to do on my own in case it ruined the beams - the house is over 160 years old!

Edit: garnhamr, that's the way I think is going to be the most aesthetically pleasing with minimum redecorating. I'll have to see which 'er indoors prefers, trunking/cables or fiddling within the lathe and plaster!
 
a way to lift the boards that i like to do is to use a pad saw (aka plasterboard saw) to cut the tounge/grove away. hard work but its slower and a bit safer than a circular saw. The house being so old though, i can imagine there being a very small gap between the floor boards and the downstairs roof (if theres beams showing in the downstairs ceiling then this will almost certainly be the case). Do you have central heating?, does the pipes go into the floor? (indicates a useable gap below and maybe you can just use the gaps that the pipes use. i'm not sure about the max temperature that cat5 can handle though and maybe theres a cold water or a gas pipe you could run next to instead)
 
why not use flat cat5e cable and just slide it under the carpet (assuming there is carpet)

That's what i used when needing a new port in the lounge - 15m of flat cat5e cable and quicly lifted the side of the carpet, slide cable underneath, replaced carpet - job done.

You can't feel the cable under the carpet as it's only about 3mm thick. works great instead of the usual rounded cable.
 
Bossk128 said:
It's Friday!

The run is probably no more than 25m. I can't lift the floor boards due to tongue and groove wood flooring, but anyway, I'd have to go through the joists, no? That's not something I'd be prepared to do on my own in case it ruined the beams - the house is over 160 years old!

Edit: garnhamr, that's the way I think is going to be the most aesthetically pleasing with minimum redecorating. I'll have to see which 'er indoors prefers, trunking/cables or fiddling within the lathe and plaster!
Click to expand...

eek! lath and plaster, RUUUUNNNNNNN!. run as far as possible and buy a new house in the proccess.
Yeah lath and plaster is a nightmare and there will more than likely be horizpntal batterns so you would not make it to the loft without a lot of mess. I fear that either mini trunking (16mm x 16mm) or a more 'bodge' it into/under the carpet and/or floorboards and laminate makes more sense here. Sometimes you can sqeeze the cable into the tounge and groove area between 2 floorboards.Sometimes you can squeeze the cable into an availible gap between the skirting board and floor boards. You could simply clip it to the top of the skirting board though.

Going through the doorways.
You could drill a small hole (drill slowly because of the lath/plaster and don't use hammer function) through the wall somewhere instead (not necessarily next to the door!, maybe in the corner of a wall so you can take more advantagous routes (but you may have to drill thorugh a thick wood beem that the lathes are nailed into) along the hallway/livingroom/whatever)

i strongly recommend using surface boxes for the ports because of the lath and plaster issue. You can use shallow depth surface boxes provided you get the correct faceplates.
http://www.comms-express.com/assets/specs/KRRJKLNWPDD2D4.pdf
They're not exactly good looking but just as an example.
The MK logic plus range are quite nice (with a rounded corner back box)
Get some decent 1" - 1 1/4" wood screws also (no rawl plugs if screwing into lathes/wood ;D)
 
I've bought 2 sets of Devolo Powerline SEII's. So 4 adaptors in total. I'll get them through Wednesday. Gona do some large file transfers etc and get some speeds. Fingers crossed I can stream HD from the HTPC.

PS, those pictures are crazy! So much cable! Live in a 4 story house so it'd be messy running cable.
 
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The cable, true, there is a lot of it.

However, when it coems to raw speed, nothing, and I do mean NOTHING comes even close to a fraction of its speed.

I recently upped to gigabit lan, by simply swapping my switch over, and I still need to change a few bits over, because the router is only 100 abd I have my main PC and thw switch connected to that rather than teh router connected to the switch, so that means that the Main PC is still stuck on 100Mb while all the others are 1000

But the fact remains that not using the cables is useless to me.

You mention a 4 story house, but, I also installed a LAN socket in my mother house for her a few years ago. This was even more complex than mine, because she has a 12 bedroom house with 2 living rooms, and she does both fostering and B&B and I had seperate cables going to each room, into a junction box in the middle of the stairs in a small cupboard.

I decided on simply having one socket in each room, and the junction box was a 16 socket box ( Not all used of course )

I have then cut corners but Im using 2 8 Port Switches, and a modem, with the telephone wires then going down to the master socket.

Its about 50 trillion miles of cables but all of it very professionally done and totally invisible.

Again, the cables are better than other options simply because you can have lots of PCs all connecting to the internet and you get no lag, or no noticeable lag anyway.

Similrly with my own setup, I have torrents downloading 24/7 on my main PC, my daugther watches her Lady gaga junk on YouTube or whatever, and my and the boys play UT online and we get zero lag, and hell, I can even copy loads of files to/from any PC in the house to any other.

You cannot do that as wel lwith anything other than cable.

As for the homeplug things... We have 2 sets... Belkin Turbo and a Zyxel set. Both are actually slower than 11Mb wireless. ( I have an old LapTop that has this )
 
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