Webb Family Blog

This past weekend, I went down to my parent’s new house in Waterford to work on the wiring. I left Roseville quite early in the morning, leaving around 6AM and arriving in Modesto around 8AM. My dad and I then took off for Home Depot to get a few items we’d need for the project at hand. I don’t recall exactly what time we made it to the house. We had 3 major tasks that needed to be done. We needed to work on television, telephone and Ethernet (computer network) connections… both terminating the ends of the wires and labeling each wire with where it goes. I had previously come up with a naming scheme and brought a few pages of printed labels to put on the wires. The television wire is RG6 coaxial cable and the connections are fairly simple to attach. I quickly trained my dad to put the connectors on and I started on the task of wiring the Ethernet network. The Ethernet and telephone wiring were both done with CAT-5e cable and physically identical. I needed to trace out what wire went where and connect one end to a patch panel in the wiring closet and place a network jack on the other end. My dad was able to finish doing all the television wiring and map it out quickly and he began assisting me. Each CAT-5e cable has 4 pairs of wires, (blue, orange, green and brown paired with a white and colored stripe). I have a pair of tools for tracing a wire and another tool for verifying proper wiring. For the network, we’d first place a jack on one end and then connect a “sounding” device to the jack. In the wiring closet, I’d touch a detector unit on every wire until I got a signal. Once I found the signal, I’d connect that wire to the patch panel. Once connected, I’d use the other device. We’d replace the “sounding” device with a little module, and I’d plug in the cable verifier unit into the patch panel. I would make sure that all 8 wires are connected properly, no shorts, crossed pairs or any other issues. The device also could tell me how long the cable is electronically. With my dad’s help, it seemed like things were going well. We traced down each wire and thankfully everything was OK. We had one jack that I initially thought was bad, but upon changing the batteries in my tester, I found out it was OK. We had one other room where the orange and brown pairs were reversed… the colors look very similar… especially in poor light. I thought I MIGHT get it all done in one day, but time seemed to fly by faster than anticipated. By 5PM, I had finished all the television wire (10 potential TV jacks) and network wiring (21 potential network jacks). I just had the telephone wiring to go. I realized that I was quickly running out of time I wanted to work there, so I decided I’d need to spend the night and start again the next day.

On Monday, I started a little later, probably around 10AM. Each room now the wires terminated neatly on one face plate with telephone, television and network jacks on it. I just needed to wire the telephone connections in the wiring closet. This turned out to be an extremely time intensive job. First off, I had two termination blocks called “100-pair 110 Blocks”. These needed to be pre-wired. This meant weaving wires on them in a very precise fashion. As I had two of these blocks, my dad and I both sat down weaving wires. It was very sore on the finger tips. The wires are in a tight twist and they need to maintain that twist as much as possible. As soon as both blocks were woven, we took off for lunch. (On an interesting side-story, we stopped at a vehicle accident on the way back to the house from lunch. A guy hydroplaned his big work truck off the road and took out about 3 almond trees. He was un-injured.) After lunch, I mounted the 110 Blocks to a board and started terminating all the telephone connections… about 19 in total. I finally finished around 5PM and my fingers were now extremely sore. I then decided to check out every telephone jack. I was able to verify that all the jacks were wired properly except one. That one jack had a dead second line. Not a major problem, as we only intend on hooking up one phone line, but I want the job to be perfect. Actually, there is a capability of 3 independent phone lines per telephone jack. I checked the jack that had a malfunctioning 2^nd line and found that the orange pair wires were both broken somehow. I fixed this and then all 19 jacks were now verified for 3 lines. I finally left Waterford around 5:30PM.

The Ethernet patch panel and many other electronics will be mounted in a nice rack box, which was there, but they are planning on putting in flooring in the closet, so I just left the patch panel hanging free in the closet. My father took off for several weeks to the Philippines. Upon his return, the house will be ready for move-in. At that time, I will need to return to make the final connection from AT&T’s telephone service to all the phone jacks (connecting up 1 wire will accomplish this). I will also install several satellite TV units, a multiple-channel RF modulator (to place the satellite receivers on standard channels) and a signal combiner/amplifier for the television hook-ups. Lastly comes the network; it appears that for internet, my parents will be getting HughesNet satellite Internet. I will then connect the satellite modem to a self-built router, and then to a Ethernet switch. All this will be mounted inside that rack/box. Finally, I’ll need to place patch cables between the patch panel and the switch for every outlet I want to be live. Telephone service should be easy and quick, but the rest may take a day or so to finalize. It is fun, but time consuming.