Laying Cabling

Caporegime
Joined
25 Jul 2003
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40,289
Location
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I will be wiring up three and a half rooms downstairs this weekend, and the floors will be up this weekend to get the cabling down. As we'd ideally not have to get the floors up very often (if ever!) I'll be putting in as much redundancy as I can manage.

The 'half' room is the under the stairs cupboard where my server, modem, router and switch will be moved too into the new rack I've just built. In basic and brief format (without resorting to my amazing paint skills):

[|Front Room|[under the stairs]|dining room|kitchen]

Things that will be going in: Cat5e cabling, Power cables, Speaker Cabling, a USB extender cable (for my xbmc remote).

I've a 100m drum of cat5e cabling, of which I'll probably lay 12-16 cables bundled into fours - I'll have 6 or so devices plugged into them but obviously I want the redundancy in there incase of cable failure in the future. Eventually these will go to wall sockets driven into the wall, but for the moment they will just come out of a drilled hole in the floor.

Due to lack of plug sockets I'm forced to run the power cabling to the front room, but we have an excess of plug sockets there from when we rewired it last year, and as only one will be used at a time it shouldn't be a problem.

I've a 50m drum of speaker cabling, my hifi setup runs four speakers in the front room and living room, and the cabling will only be needed for 2 speakers, as the two speakers in the front room are already wired in. Again though for redundancy I will lay two sets of the wires for each speaker.

There will only be one device in the kitchen, so two wires will be split off from one of the bundles of four to head in that direction.

I guess my main concern is do I need some shielding/insulation? Anything else I need to think about?
 
I cant see any issues with what your are doing, other than dont run the power and the cat5e on top of each other try to run them at least other sides of the beams just to help reduce noise.
 
Yes a minimum 50mm distance between mains power cabling and Cat5e is recommended and if you must cross over then do so at right angles to minimise noise problems. I've never heard of speaker cable causing interference with network cable runs so that should be of no concern if you want to run that in parallel.
 
Just incase there is signal problems with all the wires being run through a relatively small space. If there is unlikely to be any problems with interference then I should be fine.

If I do need some sort of cable insulator, anything I can buy from B&Q or Maplins really as they are in walking distance!
 
thinking about it these are the things I would consider:

Power next to Ethernet as above.

speaker cable next to Ethernet should be fine.

USB doesnt work well over long runs I believe 5 meters is max how are you dealing with this or is your run not that long?
I have had issues with mice (usb wired and wireless) and interference with RCA cables both short and long runs this might be something you wish to test or consider, personally i find that when the cables arent on the same side of my desk its fine, otherwise they tend to overlap..
 
I think the USB cable run will be between 3-5 metres max. It's purely to get an infrared receiver (via USB extender to my server, under the stairs) by the television for my XBMC installation, and depending on how I wire it I should be able to get it under 5 metres.
 
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