I bought my Hubitat but at the same time decided to increase the WiFi and Ethernet in my house to not have to use those pesky plugs.
Anyone else wired Ethernet to several rooms ?
It’s taking my longer than I expected
I do it as I am rewiring each room anyway, so i put in cable ready when I do key areas. Then its already ready for the next bit. It's messy otherwise.
My whole house has plugs. Even bathrooms, stairwells, kitchen. I have ethernet sockets like carter has liver pills.
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I have ethernet in three places where it was easy to access. 1926 house. Brutal to run copper. I don't otherwise need it in more than the three places it exists. Small house, and a three node mesh WiFi covers it all, including the backyard.
If you're running new cable, add single-mode fiber to the mix, even if you don't bother to terminate it now. Most of the expense is labor, and some future generation will thank you because they won't have to go through what you are now.
I am fortunate enough to be able to run it down the side of the house that you can't really see, so I have some plastic conduit and some outdoor cable running down there.
I thought about future proofing, but with this method I can easily upgrade in time.
Everywhere else will be covered by 2 Wifi access points
single-mode? That makes the optics more costly
For house distances I would use laser optimized 50 micron
and when pulling copper pull double what you think you need.
I am rewiring an old house and thinking about the Ethernet network. What do you think if I will use all Cat8 cables also for POE cameras?
I was wise enough to put cables in every room. even more than one in living room. Never enough. Unfortunately I didn't think about plugs high enough for (poe) cams! Do'nt make the same error.
ehm... it sound a little bit overshooting. check before the performances with PoE injectors.
Thanks Roberto. I was just thinking to use 3 or 4 Poe cameras: 2 on balcony looking at eachother, one who look at the entrance and another one jolly(still have to think if I need or if I use a WiFi one)
Then feed two speakers which I will install on false ceiling and the tv
Furthermore feed one wall plug for pc and hubitat.
I will have also a hybrid alarm(at the beginning I will use only the wired part) which can be connected on internet and with Konnect being used also from hubitat.
In your experience do you think are enough or am I forgetting something? My house is an apartment, almost square one.
Maybe you can reply to the Croatian thread so that I won’t duplicate the questions.
Thanks
It is really tough to "go back" to such areas usually so either run more than you will think you need (the cable is relatively cheap versus going back in plus you can just leave the wire without actually hooking it up if you do not want to) or leave yourself pull lines to be able to pull in more in the future if you ever need. I would almost always recommend running at least 2 wires to each indoor location as I have found many times now where it was useful to have the second port even if I am just using it for a PoE connection.
One piece of advice... make sure to test EVERY SINGLE ONE before you cover anything. I must have missed one cable when redoing one of our rooms a couple years ago and so I had one (out of 6) that must have gotten damaged somehow and has a bad wire. Unfortunately that was one of the most common wires. One of these days I will take the connectors off and swap the wires (putting a note as to why it is "noncompliant" for the future) but since I had more than enough it has been a low priority and I have not gotten around to it.
Plenum (stranded) cable handles these situations much better. It is sometimes 40% more than standard Riser (solid) cable but worth it for the longer runs where the wire might get kinked.
About 13 years ago I rewired my entire house with Cat5e replacing the old telephone wires with 2 Cat5e wires in every room, plus a few new locations. I had a 2.5 inch PVC conduit run from my crawl up to my attic so I could pull additional wires later, this has been a huge life saver. During an addition I also ran PVC conduit in wall behind TVs so again I could easily get wires up to TV.
If you have 9 foot or higher ceilings, stud bays often have blocking in them, horizontal 2x4, which make it super hard to pull wires later. This horizontal board can be at random heights too from one may to the other.
