hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0625.txt

Episode: 625
Title: HPR0625: Network Cabling at Resno's House
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0625/hpr0625.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:08:12

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The following program is WorkSafe and FamilySafe.
Feel free to listen to it wherever and with whomever you like.
Hello everybody and welcome to today's episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm Pokey, and we're here to talk about running Ethernet cable at Resnose House.
Probably most of you are not going to run Ethernet cable at Resnose House,
but since running cable in a home is so much different than running cable in an industrial setting or in an office type setting,
it's almost like a custom job every time you run cable in a home, especially when you're doing what's considered old work.
And old work is any time you're putting new cables or new work of any kind really into an existing structure,
whereas if you're building a house or a building from ground up that's considered new work.
A lot of contractors, a lot of different fields will get paid a lot more for old work,
so it's pretty beneficial to know how to run cable in your own home,
because it is pretty easy, it's low voltage stuff, you don't need a license to do it.
Of course, check your jurisdiction, but I could save you a lot of money,
and you could get a pretty good network going.
So now this started a couple of weeks ago, Resnose, when you asked me what the difference was between CAT 5 and CAT 6 cable,
and how difficult it was to run.
It was just a little too much to explain in IRC chat, so I thought we would do this together.
Sure.
It was very gracious of you to come and help me out with this episode.
Sure, no problem.
So thank you for that.
I tried recording this episode twice on my own, and just couldn't do it.
I ramble way too much doing this.
It gets hard to do.
It's a sort of a do a monologue type of thing.
Yeah, especially because I never can tell when I'm getting too deep into it,
or when I'm not going deep enough, so I'm really pushing.
Right.
So first of all, to get started, to answer the question,
what's the difference between CAT 5 and CAT 6 cable?
The biggest difference right off the bat is just speed.
The next difference is cost, and the last difference really is how difficult it is to work with.
CAT 5 cable actually isn't even a spec that's used anymore.
It's now CAT 5 E, but what CAT 5 basic is?
CAT 5 basically means it's an entire spec, and the cable is just part of it.
Is the CAT 5 cable can run up to 100 megabits per second?
So it's 10 base T and 100 base T or 100 base TX.
I'm not sure what the difference between T and TX networks are, but it can run on those.
And the longer you go with the cable, the longer the cable run is,
the more you're going to drop off that speed.
So for short runs of CAT 5 E actually can run 1000 base T networks.
It's just not super comp, people don't plan it that way.
Now a category 6 cable can run up to 250 megabits per second.
And that means 1000 base T and 1000 base TX networks.
Again, I don't really know the difference between T and TX.
Have you really noticed instances where you've run cables too far
and you've had a lot of latency or a slow down to the network?
No, because I don't generally run network cables.
I run, I work on telephones.
Okay.
So mostly we're working on category 3 cables anyway.
So as far as category 3 networks go, which are real depreciated,
but that's what the current code is for telephones as category 3.
There are things that I work with that specifically require category 3 or better.
And the cables that we run them on where I'm at, a lot of times they're underground cables.
They're 50 years old.
And they still run fine on those cables.
And those are completely unrated.
And many times they're completely untwisted.
And sealed it and everything else.
Well, yeah.
And category 5 and category 6 is going to be unshielded as well.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you're not typically going to want to run a shielded cable in your home.
Oh, okay.
Just because you have to worry about terminating that shield.
And that's a real pain in the neck.
Okay, right, right.
So when you look at the side of the cable,
you're going to look for, you know, category 5E or cat 5E or cat 6,
depending on what you decide on.
And then you're going to look for it to say UTP,
which is unshielded twisted pair cable.
Okay.
There's also STP, which is screen twisted pair.
But I don't think they use that anymore.
I haven't seen STP in a while.
But I have seen FTP, which is foil twisted pair.
And I've seen, there's another one for shielded.
So this is quite a various options of cables to wire up.
Yeah.
So is it safe to assume just to get the cat 6 or?
Yeah, I would say it's safe.
You can go with category 6 because I'll run the 250 megabits per second
if you follow the entire category 6 spec.
Okay.
Which generally to sum it up and put it in layman's terms,
don't bend the cable tightly around corners.
You want to make gentle gradual bends.
Don't loop the cable into big coils,
which in the old days, if you've run cable before,
you were instructed to loop that cable when you get to the end of it
where the jack is going to be, you know,
put a good 20 or 30 feet on the loop of that cable.
In case we have to move the jack in five years,
we won't need to run another one.
Okay.
You can just cut that loop free.
Category 6, you don't want to do that with it all,
because you're going to get attenuation in there.
Another big deal with category 5 and category 6 cables,
if you're sticking with the spec,
is to terminate the cable as close to the outer insulation as possible
and to leave as many twists in the cable as possible.
Okay.
So if you're punching down to say a 110 block,
what you want to do is run your cable all the way in
where it's going to go and seat it in place where it's going to be,
and then find the closest point to where the punch down is,
and ring the cable.
Do you don't ring any cable is?
No, I don't.
Okay, good, because I thought our listener doesn't know either.
Ringing a cable is kind of scoring the outer sheath of it.
Okay.
And there's a cable stripper.
There's a tool that'll do that for you.
It's got a tiny little razor blade in it,
and it cuts just a fraction of a millimeter to scores it.
And then you can just kind of bend the cable a little bit,
and it'll break off,
and it'll be like a perfect circle where it breaks off there.
You can also ring it with electricians scissors
or any kind of scissors really,
but electricians scissors are really nice to use.
They're very quick,
and what's nice about them is they have one straight blade
and one serrated blade,
and the serrated blade doesn't let the cable walk around on it,
so you can spin that.
It's good for cutting bigger cables too,
but you won't be getting into that.
When you're running cable in an office building or something,
you've got all kinds of standardized stuff.
You've got conduits, you've got cable trays,
you've got rings, you can fast into the ceiling
to run stuff through,
all kinds of fun stuff that just make it go really quick
and really easy, and you can make it pretty.
And you've got one of the biggest advantages in an office building
is the suspended ceiling or the suspended floor,
where you can hide a lot of sins up in there.
You can do a whole lot that you wouldn't be able to do in your home.
Right.
You wouldn't want to see it,
and your wife sure don't want to see it.
Not at all.
Not at all.
The trick to running in a house is hiding the cables in the walls,
and there's several specialized tools that can cost you a bundle,
you know, if you have to buy them all at once,
but if you buy them with the thought that you can use them again,
that doesn't hurt as much, you know, so we'll get,
I think we can get into that first.
Sure.
And the first thing you're going to want to buy for your home
is a stud finder.
Okay.
And you want to really goods,
do you want the best one you can afford?
And how can you tell the difference between a bad one and a good one,
just price alone or?
Well, you can try them and use them and tell the difference.
The only one that I've ever used and really liked,
I hate to give up brand names,
but it was a Zercon, I think it was the name of it.
I got it at Home Depot, it was about $18 or $20,
and it had an audible tone to it that lets you know
when you hit the stud,
and like most of them,
mostly electronic ones anyway,
the ultrasonic ones,
it has a set of lights to kind of climb up and light up for you.
So a stud finder is really good,
and you do want an ultrasonic one.
There's the old style, there's the magnetic ones,
but all those really find a screws and nails.
Okay.
They don't find wood,
and that would be okay
if all you had was an empty interior wall.
You really only need to find the screws
because they've gone into the stud.
The screws and nails.
Right.
And the studs of course go Florida ceiling.
The trouble comes when doing residential work
is that there's fire stops in a lot of walls.
Okay.
And there should be fire stops in a lot of walls.
Right.
And what a fire stop is a piece of two by four,
the same material that the stud is made out of,
and it runs horizontally instead of vertically,
and it's designed to stop fire,
to some other fire if the fire is inside the wall.
But it's going to stop you from pushing your cables
for real fast.
Right.
So you need to know where those are,
and when they're there.
So the first thing is definitely a stud finder
and just to know where your studs are
and what you're working with.
Okay.
A tape measure if you don't have one
is going to be important
because you need to know...
You got to have to find some kind of
for lack of a better term, a landmark
that you can identify from, you know,
the basement to the first floor.
Okay.
We'll say good things for that are like copper pipes
because you know those go through.
Not so great things are like outlets and wires.
You know electrical outlets and wires.
Sometimes they don't go straight in the wall
so they're not the greatest thing.
Okay.
If you've got a copper pipe for a sink
or a heating pipe or something like that,
those are a pretty good landmark
and you can measure from them.
And the reason you'd want to do that
is because you're going to have to drill some holes.
Okay.
So you're going to need a decent drill.
I will really can use any drill.
But you'll need a decent drill bit.
And I always like using just the spade bits.
If you've seen those, it's a flat bit
with a point in the middle and kind of two points on the side
and they just make holes really, really fast.
And they're really cheap.
Is there any certain diameter that you choose?
Do they come in different diameters?
They come in, yeah.
They come in any different diameter you can think of.
Just about, they'll have a spade bit for that.
And it's going to depend on how many cables you're running
and how risky the hole that you're making is going to be.
Okay.
You know, if you're coming up beneath a soft floor,
like linoleum, that might only have a piece of plywood under it,
you're going to cut through that really, really fast.
If you miss and go off that stud a little bit,
so you'd want the narrowest one you can get away with.
Okay.
On the other hand, if you're not worried about that,
then you're able to drill straight,
and usually you're not, because usually you're next to the foundation,
then you're drilling at an angle.
But if you can drill straight, go ahead and use a nice big one
like a half inch or maybe even three quarters.
Half inch is fine for like one to maybe three or four cables.
More than that, you're going to want a little bit more.
Not that there's any lack of space once the cable is in there,
but as you're running it, the space helps.
Okay.
And as you're fishing the wall, the space helps.
So you said fishing, what does that mean?
Okay, fishing a wall is usually done with a fish tape
or with, we call them glow sticks.
They're fiberglass rods that are threaded male
and one end in female and the other.
And you stick the rod or the fish tape into the wall
and you try to find the hole that you've drilled downstairs
and poke it through it.
And then you can tape your wire with electrical tape,
just tape your wire onto that fish tape and pull it up.
Okay.
So where I am, we don't have a lot of basements.
So how is it different if you're using say an addict
or something above the space instead of going under?
It's not too much different, except that you're not probably
going to have any copper pipes to measure with up there.
Okay.
But you might have a chimney or something that you can measure from.
Again, you want it kind of fixed.
Otherwise, you're really guessing at it.
Okay.
When you're guessing at it, you just have to make your best guess.
Sometimes an easy way to do it is not the best way in the world,
but sometimes you get no other choice.
You can just grab some wire mold, it's called.
It's a piece of plastic that's self-adhesive
and it's just kind of a square tube and it sticks to the wall
and you run the wire in that.
And sometimes that's all you can do.
But if you can get into the wall,
what you might want to do then is you first you make your hole
in the wall and have you ever used an old work box?
I don't know what that is.
Is that like a juxtapoint?
It is a junction point.
Yeah.
If you want to use the matricians, usually like if you went to
Home Depot or Lowe's, they're like a little blue box
and they're two by four is the standard size,
two inches across four inches tall.
Or you can go with a bigger one, you can go with a four by four
but you probably won't need that for just networking.
Okay.
But you might want like a four by four box behind your television
where you might have cable coming through it,
you might have two or three Ethernet connections nowadays.
You know, so you may want something like that behind there.
But if you make that hole in the wall,
you're going to trace around the edge of your old work box
and then cut it with a drywall saw.
And that's going to cost you another couple of bucks,
maybe you know, three or four dollars for a cheap one.
I've been using the same cheap drywall saw for years.
So that doesn't matter.
Okay.
Actually, here's a little tip.
Cheap drywall saws are like three or four dollars.
They've got a wooden handle usually
and they're pretty plain Jane looking.
And then right next to it on the shelf,
you'll see like a fancy one.
And it'll be rubberized handle
and like gnarlier looking teeth.
I'll spiffy that.
And a tapered point.
Yeah, and it is spiffy that.
But the only thing that really makes a difference
between the spiffy, you know, $15 one
and the cheap $3 one is kind of that tapered end,
the point at the end of it.
And you can take a file and just file the end of it
so that you have one side tapered.
Does that actually help you at all when you're trying to?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, it does help.
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
Especially in like a firewall situation
where a standard wall is going to be
a half inch or three quarter inch sheet rock
and a firewall is going to be two pieces of three quarter inch.
So you've got to get all the way through that.
Okay.
The way that you do it is just put the point.
If you knew the first time you're doing it,
take that old work box, face it at the wall
and trace around it with a pencil or pen.
I like a pencil.
Oh, by the way, when you trace it,
you're going to want to level as well,
like a four inch level.
Okay.
Just to keep that thing straight.
There's usually a little bit of adjustment in the face plate
that you can twist that and make it straight
and make it look pretty,
but it's easier to do if you level the box in the first place.
Okay.
So the first one that you do,
you're going to want to take that drywall sun,
put it right in the center of that rectangle
that you've drawn.
And just hit it with the palm of your hand
until it goes through.
And once it goes all the way through,
it'll move freely back and forth.
And the only real trick with a drywall saw
is just to not use a lot of pressure
from the teeth to what you're cutting.
Just move it back and forth
and let it move the material out of the way.
It's very easy to do.
Okay.
The harder you try, the harder it gets.
Okay.
Is the trick with drywalls.
That sounds counter it to it, but okay.
Yeah, well, you have to let the tool do the work for you.
Okay, right.
And that's true of any saw, really.
If you start putting, like, say you're cutting down,
you're cutting from top to bottom.
If you start pushing down on that thing,
you're adding friction.
Okay.
If you move it in and out quickly,
gravity is almost enough to pull it down.
Okay.
And drywalls very brittle and just kind of flakes away anyway.
So I would start in the center
and just work your way out from there
until you're at the edges.
When you get a little better at it
and you've familiarized yourself with the tool
and how much room you need
because of the taper that you've got on the side
and all that,
you can start real close to the line
and just make the four quick cuts.
When I do it,
I always make the two horizontal cuts first.
And then I make the vertical cuts second
just so that there's not a big long piece
like putting pressure and trying to break off inside the wall.
Okay.
It's not a big deal.
But I try to do that.
And when you get close to the edge,
you want to slow down and just go slower
so you don't break off a big chunk
and tear the paper off the outside of it.
The paper off the inside is no problem.
If you're fishing from the attic,
you can just let that chunk fall in the wall.
You don't care.
Okay.
If you're fishing from down below,
you're going to want to get that out of there
because it might be in your way.
Okay.
So if you can take it out of there,
do it.
Sometimes you can't swim.
It just falls in and you're stuck anyway.
Now, once you get that out,
look into the wall
and you may have insulation in there
or it may be an empty wall.
Insulation is going to make things harder to fish.
Of course.
So you need a real fish tape
or the glow sticks.
And I would say,
well,
it's going to depend on what you want to,
which one to spend the money on
and how much room you have
to use them.
A fish tape is real compact.
But in its long,
you can get, I mean,
the shortest fish tape is like 25 feet.
Oh, wow.
But,
and they're pretty cheap too.
But a fish tape has memory to it
because it's just a big piece of spring steel.
Okay.
So as you pull that thing out,
it, you know,
out of the ring that it's kind of stored in,
it doesn't want to straighten out for you.
It's not going to want to help you.
You know, it's going to want to coil up.
Right.
You can work with it's,
it's once you get the trick of it,
you can figure it out.
And you can make it work for you,
especially in an insulated wall.
I find,
I like a fish tape a little better than the glow sticks,
just because you can sometimes get it past
the insulation a little better.
Get it up against the wall
between the insulation
and the inside of the sheet rock
and it glides down a little easier.
Now, are the insulated walls?
So those are going to be
more of your exterior walls
or can it be any walls that are insulated?
Your exterior walls will always be insulated
unless your house is bad
or I don't know, maybe in hot places,
they don't have to,
but I bet they do.
Interior walls can be insulated.
That's a luxury.
Okay.
Because it,
and nowadays,
I'm seeing more and more interior walls are insulated
with really quiets down the house a lot.
Okay.
And it also helps to keep the different heat zones
in a house separate.
Okay.
And people like a warmer room than others
or they want them all even
and heat would just be traveling freely.
Right. Right.
I do find lately newer houses
you're going to see more interior insulation.
But it's not super, super common
because like I said,
it is still a luxury.
Okay.
And the interior insulation also
is going to be like R13,
which is fairly thin,
because it's in a fairly thin wall.
Okay.
And it's not super dense.
The exterior walls,
I'm trying to remember now,
it's R13R11 you find inside.
It's just the cheapest stuff.
And sometimes it's completely bagged.
And if it's completely bagged,
you're gold and you're already past that bag.
So just getting past that insulation
is your only real trick.
Unless you get that fire stop in there.
Okay.
Then you have to try and get through the fire stop
and you'll need a really long drill bit for that.
And they do sell those too.
It's a long flexible rod.
Really?
Yeah. Oh yeah.
It's,
it's,
they're about three feet long.
And it is also made of like a spring type steel.
But it's,
it's round.
So it won't bend unless you bend it.
And you can usually go up
from the hole that,
or from the hole that you made for your box.
And you can hit it from the bottom
and go through there pretty easily.
You have to be real careful.
Make sure you're going straight, though,
or you're going to poke out through the wall
into, you know, your kitchen.
Right.
That sounds like a very bad situation.
It's not the worst thing in the world.
You can patch anything.
Right. Right.
Right.
But you'll see,
you will always see the patch.
You know,
a guest in your room may never ever see it,
but you will always see it.
Right.
Of course.
Even if it looks perfect.
Exactly.
I guess one of the questions I was just thinking of.
I don't know how wires are run inside of a wall.
Is there any threat of running into a wire
that's, I guess,
running horizontally,
or do they all run vertically,
or which,
how do they run?
That's a very good question.
Lately,
electricians stick better to specs
than they used to in the old days.
So it's a good idea to have a thing
called a tick tester.
Okay.
And I wish I could tell you
what brand a tick tester to get.
But I don't know.
The only one I have is terrible.
Huh.
But would a tick tester
is a little thing in the kitchen.
So don't get that brand.
Yeah. Don't get the one that I have.
And I don't even know what one I have.
I throw it almost every time I use it.
It's awful.
It's a little thing you keep in your pocket.
And you push a button
in order to flip a switch to turn it on.
And you wave it by electricity.
And what the thing senses is
anything that happens at 60 hertz.
Okay.
And when it senses that,
it will beep at you,
or ticket you,
or light a light,
or any combination of the three.
You can know where the electricity is.
Typically,
in a newer construction,
and I'm not sure about slab basement,
you know,
slabs,
houses built in slabs are probably wired
from the attic down.
Okay.
So everything probably runs down the stud.
Okay.
When you're wiring from the basement up
or from the first floor up to the second floor,
they don't usually come down
from the basement.
They'll come up from below.
And they'll run horizontally.
I'd have to look it up.
I think it's like 17 inches off the floor.
I think that's about right.
So it's the very specific spectrum.
Nowadays it is.
Yeah. In the old days,
it's used to be.
And old work.
Again,
it's always custom.
So it's just where you can fit it.
Okay.
When electrical wires running horizontally,
it's going through holes
that are drilled in the studs horizontally.
Okay.
And between those studs,
which are usually 16 inches apart,
by the way,
like all new construction,
the studs are 16 inches on center,
center to center.
And older house,
the stuff is usually 24 inches
centered to center.
Really?
Yep.
Yeah, old houses.
Huh.
Even some new houses in some places,
I think still do 24 inch on center,
where insulation is not as big a deal.
I think they're still allowed to do that.
Not positive about that,
but I think they are.
In some mobile homes,
maybe even,
they're allowed to,
because they're built a little different.
Right.
So when they're running vertically, though,
they're always stapled to a stud.
Unless you put that in there yourself,
after the wall was up,
you're allowed to run an electrical wire
through a wall like that,
to the best of my knowledge you are,
as a homeowner, right?
You know,
I'm not going to say that I've personally done it,
but I'm not going to deny it either.
Right.
But, you know,
then you run it up in the wall,
and there's no way to staple it.
So for the most part,
they should be stapled to the wall.
And the only time you'd really have to worry about it
is,
when you're using your old workboxes,
one of the beautiful things about those,
is you put those mid-span.
You put them between the studs.
So you're going to have six inches,
at least, to either side of it.
So you're not going to be anywhere near the electrical wire.
Okay.
The other nice thing about electrical wires,
is, though,
you can't use them as landmarks.
You can run next to them.
Oh, okay.
You can poke it down through the hole.
Now, you may lose some speed on that particular run.
I don't know what the speed drop would be,
but in a house,
sometimes you cheat a little, you know.
Okay.
And drop it down there,
just because that's safer than trying to drill a hole
down through, you know, a header or a footer.
Right.
Which is what the wall studs are nailed to.
One thing I wanted to get back to was,
if you open up the wall,
poke a hole in the wall,
and there is no insulation in there,
there's a really good trick
for getting stuff in there.
Do you know what a ball chain is?
I do not.
Ball chain is a chain made of balls.
It's usually like when you pull a light on,
you know,
it lights with a pull chain,
those chains there.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yep.
Okay, so a ball chain.
Those are,
to the best of my knowledge,
always made a steel,
and then just plated with something else.
And the nice thing about steel is that it's magnetic.
So what you can do is tape a ball,
a ball chain, I'm sorry,
like maybe two or two feet or three feet,
a ball chain onto the end of something
that you can get into a wall.
And that chain,
those balls will like,
find their way down.
Gravity will,
because they're heavy enough,
gravity will pull those things down.
Right.
You can then pull them out of the wall
with like a pen magnet.
Oh, okay.
So for instance,
if you are running a wire
through your ceiling,
through your attic,
and you can get up into the attic
and get into the crawl space,
and you can drill a hole
down into the wall
on your first floor,
with a hand drill and a spade bit.
But there's not enough room up there
to get your,
you know, your long drill bit
down to drill through the,
the fire stop.
So you go downstairs,
and you make the hole
for your box,
and you put your long drill bit
up and then you drill
through the fire stop.
Well, now the trick is,
you've got to get something
from that top hole
down through the fire stop,
so you can pick it up
on the bottom.
You stick a ball chain
on the end of your fish tape,
or on the end of your glow stick,
and you get it down in there,
and you feel it,
and you listen to it,
until that ball chain hits
that fire stop.
And then you can wiggle it around,
and eventually,
it's going to fall through there.
It might take you some time,
but it will eventually fall
through the hole
in that fire stop.
And then you can pick it up
out of the wall
with a pen magnet.
Right. Right. Right.
Or somebody
could just grab it.
But that's one trick
that a lot of guys did,
even, even like pros
that I work with,
don't seem to know,
how good a fishing tool
those ball chains are.
Huh.
Because they just,
they, they kind of flow
like water.
You know, they,
they seek gravity.
They seek to run down.
Right. So that,
that's one handy thing.
Now another thing you can do,
now that I'm mentioning it,
if you're going to run
a lot of these things,
you don't necessarily need
an old work box.
You can use just a ring,
an old work ring.
It doesn't have a whole box
on it.
And it's only legal
for low voltage applications.
But they're a heck
of a lot cheaper.
Well, they're not
even a heck of a lot cheaper.
But they're,
they're cheap enough.
You know.
And they're easier
on the cable, I think,
than the old work boxes.
Because what the old work boxes
have at the back of them
is, is a,
a little flap,
like a,
a read flap,
and you push your wire
through it,
and then you pull back
on it and it locks into it.
Oh, okay.
Which you usually do
with, like,
Rolex,
which is electrical wire.
That's not the best thing
to do with your cat
five or cat six cable.
Right.
Because you can split it
right open with those.
Ah.
So you either have to,
like, pull those things
out of there,
or cut them out,
or bend them
until they're useless,
and then run your cable
in that way.
So you,
you pull your cable down the wall,
out the hole in the wall,
then you put it
in the box,
and then you put the box
in the wall,
and fix it in place
with the ears that it comes
with.
Another thing to do,
is they are,
just,
plastic rings,
they look like
an old work box,
but with the back cut
off of it.
And they're just a little
bit easier to work with.
Okay.
I use those at work,
and a lot of times,
if you have a narrow,
wall thin wall,
that's the only thing
you can get in there,
is those thin ones.
Okay.
So those,
those can be handy,
and I forget who makes those,
I'm just by googling,
LV-1,
old work ring,
or LV-1,
low voltage,
they come right up.
And those are,
those are kind of handy,
I like those two.
So,
have you ever
terminated cable before?
Have I ever what?
Terminated cable before?
Yes.
Okay.
So you know,
how to punch down to 110?
Yes.
Okay.
So for any of the,
any of the listener,
who doesn't know how to punch down 110,
just by Hubble stuff.
I hate to say it.
Again,
I hate to use brands,
but I mean,
don't buy Levaton.
You know,
you can find that in the,
in the hardware stores near you.
Forget it.
Go to an electrical supply place.
Order them special,
if you have to,
or get them on the internet.
But the Hubble stuff is so good,
because even when they rev their designs,
they're reverse compatible.
They still snap into all the old stuff,
and all the old things still snap in and work
with all the new stuff.
They're just so easy to use.
And if you buy a box of 25,
you get a tool
that doesn't even put
a little bruise in your hand.
You know,
which is actually kind of important in a house,
because otherwise,
you're going to bruise your hand,
or you're going to put it
up against the wall
and mark a wall up or something.
So,
you get a little tool
with the Hubble ones.
It's kind of nice.
It's just a little holder
that holds the jack while you punch down.
And I always just say,
I mean,
I don't even know
if they offer anything else anymore,
but I always just say,
get the 110 punch downs.
Okay.
It's the easiest thing to use.
You know,
everybody has a 110 tool nowadays.
They have,
you know,
you can see tools
with 110's on a nowadays.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
I wouldn't get one
for professional use,
but, you know,
for just using around the home,
it's fine.
And I've seen little plastic 110 tools
sold at home depot
that they couldn't have been
more than a dollar or two.
I don't imagine.
I mean,
if you're going to do it professionally,
go out and get
the Harris Tracking tool,
or
of course,
or it's Fluke now.
They were bought by Fluke.
They're just great tools.
If you're just going to do it in the house,
you could get the ideal
punch tool,
like to sell it at the home depot.
But I,
I've owned that one.
I don't like it.
So,
I guess I'm curious here.
Yep.
We've talked about the process
and how it's all done.
What are some of the things,
what are the things
that are rookie would do
if they were,
they were just taking
this project, don't.
What are some things
that they should look
out for they shouldn't do,
or they should know
before they do it?
Okay. So,
one of the biggest things
you can do,
wrong,
is really the worst,
the most dangerous part
is drilling.
You can have a lot of
mishaps while you're drilling,
especially,
like I said,
with the spade bit,
because it cuts so fast,
like say you're downstairs
in a basement,
and you're drilling up
through a sill,
or you're drilling up
through a sub-floor
into a stud wall.
You usually don't have
enough room
to drill completely vertically.
So, you have to drill
in an angle,
and that's a real guess
right there,
as to, you know,
where am I going to come out
inside this stud wall,
and am I going to come
inside this stud wall?
You can drill straight
through the wall,
if you're in an angle,
into outdoors,
and you'll have daylight.
I've done it.
Everybody's done it once.
I had another house,
where,
the house that I owned,
the heat was
baseboard,
forced hot water,
but it was real old,
and real early,
forced hot water stuff,
it was all cast iron,
and it was recessed
into the walls.
So, when I drilled up,
I drilled up
into this cast iron piece.
Fortunately,
cast iron is a lot tougher
than a drill bit,
but if I had hit copper,
I had had water
all over the floor.
Right.
And it would have kept running
and running,
so that's another thing
to watch out for.
One trick you can use,
if you're coming down
from an attic space,
is a lot of times,
like in a prefabbed home,
the ceiling itself,
the sheet rock itself,
doesn't end at the corner
of the wall.
Sometimes it continues on
a little further.
Sometimes below,
the headers,
you know, the wood that's
up there,
so it's a little tricky
to tell what's going on up
there.
You can take like a pin,
a sewing pin,
and poke it through
and see if you see daylight,
and no one will ever notice
that if it's, you know,
near a corner,
or near an edge of the top
of the wall.
And if you see daylight,
you know, that's not
the spot to drill into.
You know, it's not the first
tool I'd rely on,
but if I was unsure
of something,
that's a good way to go
about it.
It's good to have a helper,
if you can, if you can find
a helper,
someone who, if you were
feeding the wire down
the wall,
they can grab it,
or they can pull it
up for you,
or sometimes,
there's a bend that you
just can't get around,
and they can feed it
around the bend for you.
So that's nice to have,
what else for rookie
mistakes?
Cutting your wire too
short.
That's, that's got to be
painful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and ask
anybody, they'll tell you,
they'd rather throw away
20 feet of wire
because they pulled too
much than to be a foot
short.
Right.
So I always try to pull
an extra five feet
at the end of each,
at each end,
if I'm working in my house.
You know, that's
fine for the cable.
If I'm working on a
job site, I'll make sure
it's 15 feet
on each end.
Right.
And I, you know,
and I'll estimate that
into the job as well,
just so that it's there
for me if I need it.
Another rookie
mistake might be when
you're punching down,
and this is not a big
mistake.
This is easily
correctable.
When you're punching
down to your jack,
or the other end,
you're probably using a
110 strip at the other end,
or a jack panel,
or something.
A mistake is to use
the wrong pin
configuration.
That's something that I
know the pinouts.
They'll be able
to do a jack
because it says on there,
it says A
and it says B.
And it's color-coded.
For networking,
you always want to use B.
It's 568 Bravo.
You always want to use
that Bravo.
Okay.
The only time you use an A,
you don't use it
at the jack, you use it
in the cable.
And it's for making
a crossover cable.
Right. Right.
So to connect to
computers in an ad hoc
fashion,
or to hook up a hub,
some hubs
don't have
an ethernet in.
They only have the
outs.
And they'll have,
like this is old stuff,
but they'll have
something else feeding
into it.
You know, some other
wire standard.
It was one I saw.
It was like a 15 wire input.
I don't even know what it was.
It was almost a
parallel cable,
but not quite.
Then I was able to make
a crossover cable to go
into one of the jacks
and get three outputs
from it and use the rest of them.
Okay.
If you know your pinouts,
you can do a lot of tricky stuff.
Right.
But at home,
you don't really need to use it.
Just use the Bravo.
Another mistake you can make
is actually,
with Cat 5 and Cat 6,
is pinching the cable.
You don't want to pinch the cable
either.
They're laid out
and they're real specifically.
There's a spec for how many twists
per meter is in there.
They want them to be laid out
next to each other
in a certain fashion as well.
And if you pinch the cable,
you can kind of flatten them out.
And that'll,
that'll get you a little bit of
speed degradation too.
Probably not noticeable,
but yeah,
yeah, probably not noticeable.
You know,
without a real expensive tester,
you probably wouldn't notice it.
But if you pinch it,
a lot of times,
you're going to,
you're going to have that.
And one way you can pinch it,
a lot of times,
is using like a stapler
to staple it up to a stud.
You can get a wire stapler
where that won't happen as much.
And the staples are
specially shaped.
I think that's
kind of a waste of money
for a home owner,
just to do it that way.
Right.
In the home,
there's a couple of different things
you can use.
You can get
Rolex staples,
which you drive in with a hammer.
And they're slower,
but you can be sure
to leave enough room
a lot of times that I'll do
is just buy the really long
Rolex staples
and drive them in about halfway,
like the whole length of the run,
and then pull the cable
in afterwards.
Okay.
And they'll just slide
right through.
And if that cable's loose
in those staples,
it's perfectly happy
being loose.
It doesn't need to be tight.
Another one of the pitfalls
you can run into,
is if you're running
in a basement area,
and you go across studs,
like from one
to another,
like a span,
that's a big no-no
to a building inspector.
It's basically
the rule of thumb
is if a grandma
can come down there
and hang a coat hanger
on it,
that's trouble.
So you want everything
tight up against the studs.
Okay.
And that's really about it
for the real big pitfalls
that I can think of
off the top of my head,
drilling through stuff,
you know, that you didn't
mean to drill through
or that's the big one.
Cutting holes
and walls
where you didn't mean to cut them.
Right.
One, two.
I've done this myself
several times.
You may check
and check and check
and check.
And you're fine.
You're great.
There's nothing on that wall.
No problem.
I'm poking a hole in here.
And you stab that
through there
and you hit something
inside the wall
that you didn't know about.
And a good stud finder
should be finding
these kind of things.
But it may not.
And some things
you might hit inside
of a wall
when you stab your drywall
so into there
is pipes,
copper pipes
might be in there.
That's a good thing
to find
because you're probably not
going to damage a copper pipe
or the drywall saw.
Right.
But if you find a peck's pipe,
you could cut right through it.
Ooh.
That's the new plastic pipes.
You may find
an electrical outlet
that's on the other side
of the wall.
Oh.
If you're in the living room
and your kitchen's
on the other side of that wall,
you could hit an outlet
that's mounted on the other side
of the wall.
So be sure to check both sides
of the walls.
Be sure to check top and bottom.
Be sure to use the heck out
of that stud finder.
Get your money's worth
out of the stud finder.
Right.
Get your efficient walls
in a house.
Okay.
A lot of it is you know,
what some people might call
common sense.
But I wouldn't call it that.
I would call it careful,
careful calculation.
You really want to measure
twice and cut once.
You don't want to screw this up
because if you drove
the outside of your house,
now you've got
a big hole going out.
Don't worry.
Sure you can fill it
with some great stuff
or you can hang a welcome sign
of you know,
nice piece of slate
or something that you decorate,
whatever.
You can cover it up.
but you know it's there.
All right, you'll always know it.
I've done it myself several times on my own home.
I was trying to go from the basement to the second floor
and the right way to go from a basement to a second floor
is to find some place usually in the middle of the house
where you can go from the basement to the attic
and then go from the attic down.
And I could not find any place like that.
So I thought I would be able to make the hole
from my box and drill down through.
And I didn't realize that the second floor
had kind of a sill that jutted out from the first floor
and I'm just pushing my fish tape down and down and down
and I'm almost at the end of my fish tape
and I'm going, I gotta be there.
Why aren't I there?
And I'm shaking it around and I can hear it clanging
against the wall and then it sounded a little different.
I said, what is that, that's weird.
What is that noise?
It's not hitting sheet rock or a stud
and sure enough it was hitting the tree in my backyard.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
So I had to go and patch up that hole
and it's not a big fix, it's not terrible.
But I had to go patch up a hole
and find another way to get it.
It happened that I could not drill downwards
from that second floor on that particular wall
because it was a step.
It goes down, it comes in under your feet
and then goes down again.
So it really is customary.
Which is that earliest, it's just knowing your situation
working around whatever your place design.
That's right, it absolutely is.
And another thing to keep in mind
when you're running these things is home runs,
which means that everything's gonna come back
to a central location.
That central location doesn't have to be the center of your house.
It's wherever you can make it convenient for you
to have like that jack panel going.
It's real smart, I think.
So say you have a wireless router, okay?
It's got a couple antennas on it
and it's got four ethernet jacks coming out the back
or eight ethernet jacks, whatever it's got.
And you want to put that wireless router
in the center of your house, center of your house
for maximum coverage.
All right, you know, so if you got a two story house,
you want it in the middle of the first floor
up near a wall, you know, up near a ceiling
or you want on the second floor, maybe even down low,
you know, to get maximum coverage.
But that might not be a convenient place
to bring all your cables into.
You can just run the two cables to that
because of course you have a, you know,
one from your router or DSL modem
or whatever you've got going to your wireless.
And then one coming back out
and you can make like a switch there
or you can do put your cable modem wherever it has to be.
Sometimes you don't have much of a choice with those.
A wire going to another switch
and then the switch feeding out to the wireless router.
But it's tricky because now you're dealing
with different subnets.
And if you're trying to network your home,
sometimes you don't want to mess with all that stuff.
What I personally think a better way to do it
is find the spot where you want your wireless to be
and make provisions to get lots of cables to that.
One for every jack.
And then you pull those lots of cables down
to a jack panel, you break them out
so that you can get at each one individually
and then you run all the jacks
from the rest of the house to that.
Okay.
And if you're fishing a difficult wall
and you want to get four wires or eight wires down it,
you probably want to get like a bucket of pole string.
Or in a house you can usually get away with like a kite string.
And all you do there is when you fish the wall
and you push the wire through the wall
or pull the wire through the wall on your fish,
tape a piece of string into it
and pull it up with the piece of string on it.
And then when the wire gets up there,
you're going to cut the string off
and that you're going to use for your next pole
as if it was a fish tape.
It's called a pole string.
Okay.
And when you put your next wire on,
tie another string to it
because you're going to pull up your original one
and you're going to want to leave a wire behind a string behind
to pull your next wire with.
Okay.
It's real important also if you're fishing a difficult wall
and it was tough to push your fish tape down,
it's going to be hard pulling it back up.
So you're going to want to be real good
about taping your wire onto the fish tape.
There is, believe it or not, kind of a trick to taping.
If you're using regular old electric tape,
get the good stuff
because you want good strong electrical tape.
If you get the, what does it, Scotch 88 is one
or Scotch 33 I think is another.
I've used both of those, they're great.
But the trick to using electrical tape
is to make it really bond well
with what you're working on
and not come off until you want it to
is to stretch it as you're putting it on there.
Early.
Yes.
You don't want to put it on flat.
You want to stretch it as you're putting on
and you want to put it on tight
and it will wrap on there tight and hold pretty well.
When I wrap electrical tape, especially for a tight pole
and I think this does make a difference.
Say for instance, I'm pulling up.
So I've got a fish tape coming down from above
and the wire is coming up from the bottom.
I will start taping the wire from the bottom
and work my way up towards where I'm pulling to.
When the tape overlaps itself,
what you'll see is that the seam of the tape
is always pointing down.
Whereas if you were to start it at the top
and come down where it overlaps is pointing up
and can roll down on you and cause you to catch and stick.
Ah, okay.
And it usually makes no difference whatsoever.
Usually you can glob tape on there,
just ham-fisted on there, no problem.
But in a tight pole, I really believe it makes a difference
that you start from the bottom and overlap every wrap
so that you don't have any surface pointing up.
Or have you got a specific wall in your house
that you think might be tricky?
No, I haven't even looked at it really.
It was, you know, we have this place
and I've been trying to think about how to wire it up
and I haven't even started working out the process
just sort of thinking, how would it be done?
I don't like you have cable installed,
they just go straight for the wall and drill it in the wall.
They do, they go from the outside of the house.
Right.
And they drill in, they don't do anything inside.
Right, they don't even try to drop wires
or fish, you know, any of that type of stuff.
They just run to the wall and drill it in.
They call it a deck.
Yep, yep, exactly.
Yeah, they call that wrapping a house.
Wrapping a house, okay.
Yep, you'll see some houses like these giant mic mansions, right?
You know, this guy just paid 350 grand
to have this place built
and he didn't pay the electrician to run cable.
So the cable guy comes and he's got, you know,
six bedrooms and a living room and a den
and the kitchen and he wants cable in all of them.
And you will see a bundle of 12 cables,
you know, cable TV cables just bundled together,
wrapping around the outside of this guy's 200,000 dollar house.
Wow.
You know, wrapping a house is horrible.
Right.
Yeah, wow.
That's pretty crazy.
It is, it is, it's, it's pretty nasty.
Now another thing you can do is you're probably going to buy
a single box of cable and it'll be, you know,
like I said, either cat five or cat six,
category five cable, which is cat five E, like I said before,
you can usually get that in a box
and it pulls off the box.
It pulls out from the center of the box
and it's real easy to pull that out of there.
It's a, it's a nice easy thing to do.
But you have to watch out for that cable kinking.
That was one thing that I should have mentioned before
when you says anything watch out for.
Okay.
You want to watch out for your cable kinking
as it comes out of the box.
If it loops and you pull the loop out,
it'll put a twist in it and a kink
or if it twists on its own and that kink
can catch while you're pulling.
Ah, okay.
And it does not take much tension at all
on a kink to make you pull for all your worth
and not be able to move that cable.
I mean, you'll break the cable in half
before that kink let's go.
If you get a kink, you know, try to find it,
pull back on it and untwist it.
Sometimes you can't find it, but if you pull back,
you can still work your way through it.
And if you know you have a kink
and you know you can't get to it
without undoing everything you've done,
of course you can tie a pull string on the end of it
and pull everything back and then take care of it.
If you can't, it's just, it's buried.
It's inside the wall or it's under a crawl space.
It's someplace that you cannot get to
no matter what you do.
You pull back about five or 10 feet a cable,
then you pull it really fast.
And you hope that it comes through,
just bounces through with speed.
If you pull slow, you're guaranteed to catch it again.
Ah, okay.
So it's a little counterintuitive
and you don't want to pull hard
so that if it does catch, you don't want to pull it
and break the jacket.
Right.
But if you pull fast, you can usually bounce it through there.
You just, you have to be kind of close
to the end of your run or at least close to an opening
for that so you can untwist it
or else it's just gonna keep catching.
Ah, okay.
And that's, that's trouble if you're working alone.
You've gotta go, you know, you're up in the attic.
Now you've gotta go all the way downstairs.
You probably take your shoes off, go over and, you know,
pull it back a little bit,
then go back up to the attic and try to take care of it.
My wife didn't let me wear shoes
and I was just gonna work and so I hate having to go back up
and stay upstairs and downstairs more often than I need to.
You know, unless she's not looking.
Right, right, of course.
Yeah, do it quickly.
Yeah, exactly.
So that can be a little tricky.
But you can also use what's left in that box
as your jumper cables.
Okay.
Going from the wall to your devices.
There's really nothing wrong with that.
Some people won't wanna do it
because your jumper cables are usually stranded wire
and the stuff you're gonna put in your walls
is gonna be solid wire.
Okay.
So some people don't like to do that
because solid wire is just stiffer.
It's really nothing wrong with it.
You can go for it.
Of course.
No, do you have a crimper?
No, I don't.
Have you ever crimped cable?
Yes, I have.
Okay, a lot of people don't know how to crimp cat 5
and it can be a little tricky.
So for our listener, I think I'm just gonna go through it
real quick.
Sure.
When you're crimping down an RJ45 onto the end
of a piece of cable, the easiest way to do this,
ring the cable and break the jacket off
about four to six inches back from the very end of the cable.
So you've got four to six inches
of twisted pairs sticking out the end of the cable.
You wanna cut the rip cord,
which is, there's a little cord in there.
It's a piece of thread in there.
You wanna cut that out and get it out of your way
so you don't need it.
And then you wanna untwist your cables
as far back as you can to the end of the jacket.
Then lay them out next to each other
in the order that you need them to be
and then kinda run your thumb, pull your thumb away
from the, towards the end of the cable and away from you
so that they kinda curl towards you.
They'll curl up and towards you
and then put your thumb under and pull them again
so they curl down away from you
and do it back and forth a few times
and you'll flatten that cable out
and you'll take the little kinks and twists out of it.
So now you've got six inches of almost perfectly flat cable
that you can work with
and that's very easy to insert into an RJ45 plug.
So then you just line your plug up next to it
and figure out how much length you need
and cut off the excess and throw it away
and it's very easy to crimp that down at that point.
But I've seen even pros try to stick, you know,
kinky twisty cables in there one at a time
and just get very frustrated
and it is a frustrating thing.
Yeah, it is.
That's the one part that I can speak to.
Like gain the colors straight
and then actually gain a cable into the jack
gain that full connection word, you know,
getting it tight and a full connection
so that it actually gets the connectivity.
Yup, it is.
And one thing that I like to do
as I'm getting them nice and flat like that
is I'll pull the jacket back away from the end of the cable
just kind of slide it back as far as I can
and pinch it and hold it really hard
while I'm flattening those things out.
So that when you insert your cable ends into the RJ45,
you can push the jacket back up in there
and there's a piece built into the RJ45
that's meant to grab onto the jacket.
So it's kind of important that you get
a little bit of the jacket in there.
All right.
Yeah, that was one of my problems.
I didn't get enough of the jacket in there.
You know, you could wiggle it right back off again.
Yes.
You crimp it in it.
It's not enough there to catch.
So it just flops right all off.
Yeah, well, that's the other problem too
is that's not having not enough jacket.
That means the wires weren't inserted fully.
Right.
If the whole thing pulled off,
before you squeeze your crimper down
as you're pushing those wires into the RJ45,
you want to look at the end of the RJ45
through your crimping tool
and wiggle your cables around
and make sure that you can see them all actually touching.
Okay.
And once they're touching
and you're ready to crimp,
that's when you push your jacket in.
You don't let your jacket slide up into there until then.
And I've gotten a hundred percent success rate
putting cables on that way.
If you've ever seen foam wire,
which I work with a lot,
and it's just four flat wires.
And all you do is strip a little bit off the end
with the stripping blade that's on the crimping tool,
put the end on it, push it in and crimp it.
You don't have to line anything up or do anything.
And you don't get a hundred percent success rate with those.
Okay.
But you can with network cable.
Oh, let me go over one more thing.
This is something you will definitely want to think of.
If you're running cable in your own home,
is the difference between riser cable and plenum?
Okay.
Have you ever heard either of those words before?
I have not.
Okay.
Riser cable is just a generic term for cable
that allegedly is for going between floors.
Riser, it rises between floors,
which is not necessarily true
because you can run it on horizontal runs.
So it's kind of a misnomer.
And the other one is plenum.
And what plenum is all of the insulation in a plenum cable.
If they burn, the smoke will not kill you.
If you burn riser cable, the smoke is toxic.
So why use the plenum then?
You would want to use plenum
if the smoke is going to be somewhere that you may breathe it.
Okay.
Typically speaking for the safety of your family
and your home, yes, plenum is the thing to choose.
The thing to keep in mind about plenum
is it's much more expensive than riser cable.
Of course.
And it's much more difficult to work with
because the jacket itself,
it's not that nice jacketed cable like you are used to seeing.
A lot of times it's very plasticky and crinkly
and it can catch on lots of stuff.
Okay.
So it's a little more difficult to run.
It can be a lot more difficult to run.
If you have a choice and it doesn't cost anymore,
you want to get plenum on a spool not out of a box.
What's the difference between those?
Typically a box is a lot easier to pull out of.
Okay.
It pulls from the center of the reel
or of the spool of cable
and the box just sits there and there's no moving pieces.
There's just a kind of a plastic tube
that sticks in the middle.
Okay.
And it pulls everything out from the center.
Very, very easy to work with.
A cable reel is a spool that's gonna be plastic.
Usually nowadays I've seen wooden ones.
I've never seen a metal one for a network cable
but I've seen metal ones for electrical cable.
And you're gonna need something for that spool
to spin on and unwind from.
If you're pulling off of that, you want that to spin.
You want an axle in there to be horizontal
and it spins off of there.
Right.
It doesn't spin away from you.
Well, it can spin away or towards
doesn't really matter which way it goes.
But if you stand the thing upright
and try to pull off the top of the spool, pull off the end
every time you take cable off there,
it's gonna put a twist in every single spin.
It's gonna put a twist in your cable
and you're gonna get kinks like crazy.
Okay.
You won't even be able to do it.
It won't even work.
You'll get 25 feet away from your spool
and you'll just be in a tangle of cable.
And the only way to fix it is to go back
and literally spin it back on that way,
the way it came off and now go twist it back on
and now find something to put that spool on.
Ah, okay.
I've seen boxes of cable with spools in them
and the spool just spins inside the box.
Those are kind of handy if you have a plenum
because it doesn't,
plenum won't kink as much coming off the spool.
It just, it spools don't kink as much as boxes.
Boxes can have a tendency to kink
and riser doesn't typically kink coming out of a box.
Okay.
Till you're close to the end.
You know, that's the reason to go with a spool
if you're using plenum and a box if you're using riser
if you can get it.
I've seen category six cable that I can imagine
it coming in a box.
It's just so thick and so stiff
and I've seen the spools of category six
that some of the other guys where I'm working at are using
and I can't imagine pulling that out of a box.
I don't think it would work.
And some of them I've seen some of the earlier
category six stuff I've seen that's not quite as thick.
The boxes are just giant, you know,
maybe 50% larger than a box of cat five
and they've each got the same amount of cable
and boxes are a thousand feet
and a spool is a thousand feet.
So that's something to keep in mind too.
And the last time I bought cable for home,
the riser cable, category five riser cable
was I think it was $80 for the box for a thousand feet,
which isn't too bad when you think about
all the runs you're getting out of it.
The price of plenum for the same thousand foot box
and same brand and everything.
Category five E, it was $175.
Wow.
So it was more than twice the cost for plenum.
Right, that's quite substantial difference.
It is and that and the difficulty of pulling it.
I've never had plenum that was easier to pull than riser.
Okay.
One of the other things about category six
is all the stuff I've seen lately
has a piece of plastic in the middle of the cable
and it's like an X shaped thing
and it seems to just keep the twisted pairs
separate from one another.
While it's inside that cable that can't cross over
if you bend it or something.
So that seems pretty good for keeping the speed up
but that stiffens the cable a lot.
Sometimes you want your cable to be stiffer
if you're going on a straight run,
makes it a lot easier to go.
I mean, you can go 500 feet on a nice long straight run
if the cable's stiff and doesn't have a lot of memory to it.
We could talk about patch panels.
Okay.
So for a patch panel, usually the best thing you can have
is a nice big piece of plywood
that you can mount everything to
and you want to stick it in your basement
but I'm not sure where you might put a patch panel
if it's in your home.
Okay.
You might probably have to like find a closet
somewhere that you can stick it in.
Find a piece of plywood.
In plywood's good, you want plywood
because you can drive a screw into plywood.
You can't really drive a screw into sheet rock
and expect it to hold even mollies.
I don't like in sheet rock.
They will just, they'll pull out eventually.
You know what a mollie is?
Yeah.
It's a little plastic plug.
Think of like a plastic cylinder
with a hole down the middle.
Okay.
And it's kind of split most of its length
and you stick that in a hole in sheet rock
and when you push, when you drive your screw into it,
it spreads out and pushes against the sides of the sheet rock.
Okay. Okay.
So instead of pulling on the sheet rock
from front to back, it's pushing on its side
to side and putting tension on it that way.
Those are great and concrete.
They're fantastic and concrete.
They hold really, really well.
But I don't like them in sheet rock.
They do pull out.
I've seen mollies that thread into the wall
that have just giant threads and are supposed to hold with that.
Those seem to do a little bit better.
But if you have to go into sheet rock,
the best thing you can do is find a stud
and screw into that or use a butterfly screw.
And that's a kind of a screw.
It's got a machine thread to it
and the end of it has a couple of little metal wings
and they fold in to get narrow
so you can push it through a hole.
And as soon as they're in there,
they spring outwards so that they pull
on the back of the sheet rock and those are pretty strong.
Okay, so it's fairly like lock bit there.
Almost.
Yeah, those are pretty locked in.
Those are pretty good.
But having to use a bunch of them next to each other
can be a real pain in the neck.
If I had to put a patch panel in a closet,
I would still use a piece of plywood
and I didn't always just paint it to look like the closet.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And it's not gonna matter too much anyway
because you're gonna be mounting equipment to it.
But the edges of it, you'll see,
you know, and your wife will see and say,
what's all this and why am I getting splinters on my clothes
and you know that you're hanging out.
But you know, when you're limited in space,
that's what you gotta live with.
Right.
So that's one good thing to do.
And everything we're talking about today too,
you know, this can all apply to any kind of cable
that you're running in your house.
Cable just means metal wires inside a jacket.
So you could be running speaker wire
with the things we've talked about today.
You could run electrical wire,
you could run telephone wire, doorbells, alarm systems,
so all these things, these are all how you,
you know, you get wires through the wall and stuff.
So it's a good thing to know.
One really good thing to have
before you get started is a beginner's book
on home electrical wiring.
Okay.
Those are really good to have.
I paid maybe $18 or $20 for the one that I have.
And it'll teach you how to patch sheet rock
because sometimes you just have to cut sheet rock
to get into a wall.
So there's nothing else you can do.
It'll teach you how to patch sheet rock.
It'll teach you how to,
it'll teach you the general rules of thumb
and where you can find those electrical wires,
how high you want to mount stuff on the wall.
And there's all kinds of codes for that too,
for where you want your electrical outlets on the wall.
Right.
A lot of older houses, they're lower down
and a lot of newer houses,
what they'll do is they'll raise the electrical outlets
and they'll lower the light switches a little bit,
just that older folks don't have to bend as far
or reach as high up to get them.
Oh, okay.
And if you're running cable
and you're buying all these tools anyway
and you're buying this giant box of cable,
1,000 feet, which sounds like a lot,
but it's not, depending on how many runs you're making.
If you got it left over and you're running it anyway,
I always say run two jacks at least per room.
You have one on each wall.
You never know, you might want to move a desk somewhere else.
Okay.
And if you're in a pinch, here's a trick.
You can actually, you won't be meeting spec with this,
but I've seen it done, you can split ethernet cable.
When you open up that cable
that we've been talking about all night,
there's four twisted pairs in there.
Your 10 base T and 100 base T
and probably 1,000 base T, I'd have to check the spec.
They only use two pairs.
The other two pairs are just dead,
they're not doing anything at all.
So if you know which pairs to use in there,
you can cut the jack it a little bit further back
and spread them out and punch them down
to two different jacks.
That's a handy trick.
And there's also, I've seen splitters
that you can buy and plug into the jack at each end.
So if you've got one in the wall behind your computer
and all of a sudden now you have a network printer
that you just bought and you've only got the one run going,
you can buy a jack splitter and you plug it into the wall
and you plug your computer into one
and you plug your printer in the other.
And at the other end of the cable back at your router,
you plug another splitter
and then you put two ethernet cables going into that
and it will use two pair for each of those devices
inside your four pair cable.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, it can save you a lot of work.
If you've only run one, or if it was built into the house
that way, because if it's built into the house,
if somebody thought of that when they were building the house
and putting your cables in,
they're all stapled into the wall
just like electrical wiring is.
Okay.
And they won't move.
If you put them in there and you know you put them in there,
you can usually just use it as a pole string
and pull in two more cables.
Right, right, cables not that expensive
that you can't use one as a pole string.
Or else you can tape a pole string to the end of your cable,
pull it back up and then tape another one to it
and pull it down and now you have two.
You can use a cable to pull in a pole string
and then use that same pole string
to pull the cable back.
Right, right.
Yeah, pretty much everything is custom.
And the more you know about the house that you're working on,
if you've seen that thing built,
like if you're building a home
and even if someone's running cable for you,
take pictures, take pictures of everything
and you can go back to those pictures in 10 years
and go, oh wow, this cat six is so old.
I'm gonna need cat 12 in here
because this is just ridiculous now.
Or wow, who uses copper anymore?
We need fiber.
If you know how it's built
and you know where to get,
you know, how to get from point A to point B
where all the holes aren't everything,
you can go for it, it's easy.
You know, even if you wanna hire someone to do a for you,
say here, here's the pictures.
Okay.
So yeah, that's about it
for running cable at Resnose House.
That will prove.
Yeah, I'd say so.
Thank you, Resnose, for joining me
and helping me out with this.
Sure.
And that really helped.
Like I do on all of the HPR episodes that I've done so far,
I'd like to close with a song from songfight.org.
And the song I'm gonna pick today
is by a band called the Anarchyologists
and I haven't done any research on this band whatsoever.
I don't know if you can find them on the internet anywhere
at all, but they've got this one song called Twerp
spelled T-W-3-R-P.
And I like this song a lot.
I don't know if it's the only song in songfight.
I didn't even look at it.
Resnose, we got together last minute on this one.
So I didn't do a whole lot of research on it,
but the band is Anarchyologists and the song is Twerp.
And thank you all very much for listening
and I hope you enjoyed the show
and I hope you liked the song.
Thanks.
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And you sure listen closely, you don't want to be odd to work
No
Now that I'm in the hand, nothing in the bed I clearly see
I clearly see my father, who's just as clueless as me
When my kids are dancing up on the table
I was looking straight in the eye
Before they know that they are in trouble
The words you say go back in my mind
Be good to your mother and father or you'll break their heart
Be good to your brother and sister or they'll tell you apart
And the peace in this house will never ever be disturbed
And you should listen closely, you don't want to be odd to work
When my milk and cookies roll off the table
My father looks me straight in the eye
Before I know that I am in trouble
The words you say go back in my mind
Be good to your mother and father or you'll break their heart
Be good to your brother and sister or they'll tell you apart
And the peace in this house will never ever be disturbed
And you should listen closely, you don't want to be odd to work
Thank you for listening to Hack or Public Radio
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net so head on over to C-A-R-O.N-E-T for all of us in need