Networking a whole house from scratch - masses of advice needed!

Powerlines suck. They are a band-aid solution for small scale 'cabled' wiring of devices in places where you cannot or cannot be bothered to run cable.

They are not a replacement for or anywhere even near as good as cable.
And, I think with powerline aren't you effectively setting up and old style "shared cable" ethernet rather than the modern style switch and device star network where each cable has a single transmitter/receiver on each end. On this basis I'd expect that if you tried to use powerline for eerything you'd start to lose bandwidth due to collisions and the powerline transceivers havng to back off and retransmit
 
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I hope you didn't leave that nasty out of zone diagonal mains wiring like that!
 
I hope you didn't leave that nasty out of zone diagonal mains wiring like that!

A bit OT, but they were supposedly niceic certified electricians!

I should have known, typical tradesmen, the guy who came to give the quote and setup on the first day was late 40s and knew his stuff, 2nd day onwards it was 3 lads all under 25.

Still they used the house for recertification with an assessor who gave them a snag list as long as your arm; I'm assuming they fixed all the points!?
 
Five_star, I'd love to see that blog! Please write it up! ^_^
One question your photos have alerted me to: what do you do to the bit of wall where all the cables meet for the switch? Can you get wall mounted patch ports? Or do you use a dozen double Ethernet wall plates?
 
Ease, I started on the blog post last night, you'll probably have this figured out before I get it all done as it always seems to take me ages to get all the content sorted and all the pictures organised.

Where all the cables end up at the switch you can have either have the established way of a patch panel then use smaller network patch cables to connect your switch / router to different ports in the house
or you can just crimp on regular network connectors to the cable ends and plug these directly into your switch / router.
or as you said, you can just mount some quad wall plates and use patch cables between them and the switch.

I'd say if you have very little room and only using 8-16 ports then you could just crimp the ends on the cables and go direct but more than 16 ports and you'd have a cable nightmare.

There are smaller SOHO patch panels for 10-12 ports out there that can live in slimline cases but I don't have any experience of them.
 
Pretty brave jumping on a house after your first pay cheque! I remember doing something similar with a shiny sports car lol.

Anywho... I'd defo go the full cable route if you are going to do it, the other options just are not reliable.

1) Flush fittings are a massive bonus.
2) Consider putting the two boxes per room, on opposite sides of the room or in the likely places a computer/device would be. Consider things like wall mounted TV's/display's in the bedrooms/front room etc.
3) Check out the threads done by the other guys who have done something similar.
4) Buying cable in bulk (on a roll) is much cheaper than buying individual cables. If you want 'neat' then just save this for the cable connection from wall to device.
 
I personally used a 2u wall mounted rack for a 24 port switch and patch panel. The rack was under £20 and the patch panel was cheap too.

Make sure you get solid core cable, not stranded.
 
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