Lots of Structured Wiring

The house is complete and the owners have moved in. Their computers and televisions are all connected and operating on the structured wiring that was installed during construction. The builder and his contractors are still shaking their heads at the thought of 62 Category 5e cables and the 25 quad shield RG-6 coax cables spread throughout the walls. The estimated cost of the cable and terminations is $1000. The labor cost, priceless!

With the walls open and a couple of full days of labor the cables were installed and carefully suspended in the crawl space and attic. The designated telecommunications room is small, only 3' by 3' but everything fit. Painted plywood was installed on two walls of the room. Two foot by four foot pieces. On one wall a 300 pair 110 type punch block was secured. On the other wall, a coax patch panel was installed. The third wall was fitted with three wire shelves. The fourth wall is the door, a louvered door to help with heat dissipation.

The Category 5e cables were passed through two openings in the drywall as the drywall contractor did his installation. This was easier than trying to store the wires in the wall until the drywall was complete. It required the owner to schedule with the contractor to be present when the telecommunications room was sealed. The coax cables were passed through on the other side of the room. Panduit cable troughs were installed to guide the cables to the termination panels and to hide the hole into the drywall. The installation is pretty but Panduit is expensive when the government is not paying for it.

The house is built in an upscale gated neighborhood and still it fell victim to some cable theft. Two lengths of cable were cut from a run in the attic. The thief stole two lengths about 20 feet each. The owner would have gladly given away 40 feet of coax rather than have to re-run those drops. Fortunately, if there is a fortunate side to theft, the runs were in the floored attic and relatively easy to replace.

When designing a house, its best to locate the telecommunications room so that there is accessible attic space above and crawl space below. It facilitates initial and future installations of cable. Even with all the planning, there is always one more cable needed. This room is accessible from the crawl space but the attic above the room is floored for storage. This is better than a occupied room but it required some access holes in the attic floor. The builder glues the subfloors and then adds screws a couple weeks later. A couple dozen screws had to be removed from the access panels after the builder efficiently sealed the access panels.

Leviton structured wiring components were used for the room terminations because they are available at the local Home Depot. It is common in today's houses to use mid size or larger wall plates on electrical outlets. These mid size plates are slightly larger than standard wall plates. It was also discovered that one manufactures mid size is not the same as another mid size. The uni-body 2 and 4 port Leviton modular wall plates were not used because they are standard wall plate size and the electrician was using mid size electrical plates on traditional duplex receptacles. The Leviton module insert plates that resemble traditional duplex receptacles (not Decora style) were purchased. They didn't look good. They are not flush units. The Leviton RJ45 modules are slightly recessed behind the plate on 4 port inserts. This just wasn't going to look right in the 7 inch baseboards. The Leviton Decora module inserts were then used. They look good. The electrician provided Decora cover plates to match the size of the electrical outlet plates.

Category 5e cables were routed to every place a computer or television might be placed. Many builders and many consumers think that wireless Ethernet can replace wires. There is no way a wireless system today can provide the reliability and bandwidth that wires provide.

Coax cables were routed to all the television locations. The home theater location received six coax cables. Four additional cables were routed into the crawl space in anticipation of the Dish Network satellite installation.

After the family moved it, it was quick and easy to activate the needed telephone and Ethernet jacks and to patch the HDTV antenna and satellite signals to the televisions.

The End