An adventure in Wiring

by AJ Peck (usacomp2k3)

My wife and I bought our house earlier this year. It is a 3-year old house, but it didn’t have proper communication wiring. There are a handful of phone lines run to various rooms (which we don’t use because we are a cell-phone only house) and another handful of coax lines. Unfortunately, only 1 of the coax lines actually had signal, for various reasons. The previous homeowner had run a separate wire around the outside of the house and drilled in through the exterior wall to try to get a signal to the living room, but even that didn’t work.

So when we bought the house, i knew that I wanted to redo the wiring to put in what needed to be there. Well I finally secured some funds from the budget and set out to start my project.

Equipment:

• 6 x 10’ 1.5” PVC piping (Lowes)
• 5 x 90° 1.5” PVC elbows (Lowes)
• 4 x low-voltage bracket (Lowes)
• raw RG6 cable (family)
• raw cat5e cable (craigslist)
• 4 x wall plate (Monoprice)
• 3 x cat6 keystone jacks (Monoprice)
• 4 x f-type keystone jacks (Monoprice)
• 1 x 12-port cat6 patch panel (Monoprice)
• 13 x blank keystone inserts (Monoprice)

I chose the keystone system because it was modular and allows me the flexibility down-the-road to add more features. The 13 blanks I bought allow me to quickly add more connections in the various rooms. I put in 4-port wall plates in the 2 of rooms which are not expected to have many requirement changes down the road) and 6-port outlets in the 2 rooms in which I plan on expanding.

So now on the actual work. We have a 2000 sq. ft, 4-bedroom house for my wife and I. The master is on ground level and shares an interior wall with the living room. Directly above the master is the guest room. Also on the 2nd floor, but on the other side of the house are the 2 remaining bedrooms, one of which is my wife’s craft room, and the other is our library. I have the commandeered the closet in the library to be my “datacenter” as you’ll see later.

I decided that instead of running the bare wire in the walls to each location, I was going to put in conduit. This allows me the flexibility of running more wire down the road with minimal effort. I also did much of the construction from the attic, which meant I only had to cut 2 small holes in the interior walls, one in the master and the other in the guest room. In the library closet, I decided to run 2 separate, dedicated runs of conduit. The first would go from the closet to the wall between the craft room & library. The second would go from the closet to the guest room. I cut the 2 holes in the ceiling of the closet and ran 2 conduits upwards. These each then angle over towards where they needed to go, and then dropped vertical to go down the wall. I used a hole saw to cut through the ceiling boards and various 2×4’s. I didn’t want to go any bigger on the conduit size because I didn’t want to compromise any structural integrity when making my cuts. All holes that were cut were through horizontal pieces of wood, so no load-bearing beams should have been affected. Here are some pictures of the 2 runs in the attic. (Side note, it gets really hot in attics in Florida, even in the “fall” when it is 90+ degrees outside)

The 2 vertical runs from Closet:

To guest room:

To Craft Room/Library:

In guest room wall (ignore the hairy arm and notice the hole from the 2nd floor down to the 1st):

Now here are some shots of the wall plates and the ports:

Living Room:

Guest Room:

Library:

Craft Room:

Now the last leg was connecting it all together. In the conduit run from the closet to the guest room there were 2 x rg6 and 1 x cat5e. In the other run was 2 x cat5e and 1 x rg6. I took my little shop-vac, stuck it into the wall where the conduit ended and then sucked a length of yarn from the closet through the conduit. I then pulled a piece of string through and used that to pull my wires through. It worked magnificently. Even pulling the wires wasn’t that difficult.

I then installed the patch panel, wired up the 3 cat5e cables to it, ran short cables from the patch panel to the gigabit switch, wired the switch to the router and wired the router to the cable modem. I then took the incoming cable from the street, brought that down into a 3-way splitter. One of those goes into the cable modem, and the other 2 go to the guest room TV and then living room. When I get around to it, I’ll either replace the 3-way with a 5-way, or daisy chain another 3-way to connect the TV for the craft room, as well as have the runs for my Media Center (which is not the primary TV source right now).

As you can see, it is a mess of cables. Not everything is 100% complete yet. In my library, I have 2 tower speakers and a 24” LCD mounted to the wall. Once I get the library cleaned up (you’ll see the mess below), that monitor and the speakers will be connected directly to the Media Center for movies and music. I have a receiver in the closet that has the Media Center as its input, and I’ll run the speaker wires through the conduit to connect up the speakers. I’ll also run an HDMI cable through the conduit for the Media Center to connect to the monitor. I have my work laptop that I bring home every evening. In the event that I want to be able to get some work done from home, I have a shelf that I’m going to put in as a fake “dock” for the laptop. I’ll connect it to the receiver for audio and also run a db15 analog video connection through the conduit to plug in to the monitor. Lastly, I want to run a USB cable from the Media Center to the monitor (which has a built in USB hub & card reader) so that I can plug in a keyboard mouse. Either that, or I’ll just buy a wireless set.

Here’s a picture of the wiring in the closet:

My library:

In the living room, here’s my equipment (top to bottom, left to right):

• 42” Westinghouse monitor
• Sony receiver
• Scientific Atlantic HD-DVR (Uggh)
• 5-disc CD-changer
• VCR
• HD-DVD add-on for xbox360
• Laserdisc player
• xbox 360
• Magnavox Blu-ray player (I have no use for BD-Live)

Coming out of the wall is the network which is plugged straight into the xbox. Also the RG6 cable is connected straight into the DVR.

All the audio for the devices goes through the receiver which is hooked up with a 3.0 “front surround” speaker setup. (There is no rear wall so I haven’t figured out how to hook up the surrounds and I don’t have the budgetary approval for a sub. However, I can’t live without a center channel). My receiver doesn’t have any HDMI inputs, so all of the video goes straight to the TV, with the exception of the analog feeds from the VCR and laserdisc player which go into the receiver. There is a run from the receiver to the TV for those. We use the HD-DVD drive for playing DVD’s and HD-DVD’s and the Blu-ray player for Blu-ray’s.

I haven’t quite gotten around to ripping my DVD’s most due to being indecisive about what format I want them to end up in. Once I get the media center up and running, I’ll then be able to use the xbox360 as an extender and that will help make that decision for me. However, I’m a bit of an HD snob, so I’m not going to go to media center until I can get HD into it, so I’m one of the many people anxiously awaiting the Ceton Cable Cards (although I’m one of the lucky few who have ever seen one (two actually) and held it in my hand at CEDIA).

I hope that gives a bit of an overview of this little project I embarked on and was able to successfully complete phase 1 of. My wife is glad that there is no longer a 50’ coax cable running down the wall for the TV. I’m happy to have a dream of mine starting to be realized. Now I just need to finish cleaning up the library and it will be a nice relaxing location for listening to music and reading (as you can tell in the picture above, we love our books). I tend to try to tackle too many things at once (I’m also in the middle of walling off 1/3rd of the garage for a woodworking shop for me) and thus am slow at finishing any of them, so it is very fulfilling to have reached this stage. The total time expended was probably about 15 hours of work over the course of about two months.

Tags: coax, Media Center, network, wiring

Category: User Builds, Windows Home Server, Windows Media Center