> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous
How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.
The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.
I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.
Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.
Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.
Your details are crazy, especially the drone, but the overall concept is feasible. I did this professionally for years.
Wheeled or tracked R/C cars are much easier to control, and can pull a greater force horizontally without losing control. In the 90s it was somewhat standard, especially in office environments with drop ceilings, to use a little 9.6v Tyco Fast Traxx to zip a pullstring across the ceiling grid, then use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.)
Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge.
Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame.
In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable.
(Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)
RC vehicles, balls with an eye bolt & string w/ a sling shot, and fish tape/poles were key things for the miles and miles of network cable I ran in a previous life.
To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.
> That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential.
Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e
With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).
If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.
That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:
For typical Ethernet sure. Although there are newer standards that can use a single pair (1000Base-T1). They are very range-limited though and not what you would normally install in your house.
Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic".
Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."
You should not be surprised. A lot of us are DIYers, and see no need to pay someone to do something we can do ourselves. Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs. There is zero reason to pay someone to do it.
I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house, but I suppose they have different values than I so live and let live...
> Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs.
Except the whole point of his post was that he didn't know how to do it competently, there's no way he wants to enter the crawlspace, so has resorted to wacky workarounds.
So, no, it clearly isn't within the skill (or desire) of anyone, but many would rather resort to hackery and hubris rather than pay someone to do it correctly.
I'll counter that and say there's probably minimum wage coders in India who write equal or better code than you at 1/10th of the pay, certainly possible as they have two functioning hands.
I generally feel the same way having spent a lot of my childhood on a farm, but when I started adding up the cost of all the random tools I would buy (now that I can’t skip out to a barn with 50 years of accumulated tools) to complete a task, and the time for the multiple Home Depot runs/missed steps I’ve started to realize it’s easier and cheaper (in some cases) to have someone else do it. Though there are still some tasks I can’t help doing myself just because I enjoy the challenge, catharsis, or I just want done properly.
> I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house
I realized that it is cheaper for me to pay someone do some things than doing them myself. Instead, I can either work or do something fun or more interesting.
I think that's the key point really. For someone with even a mild interest in this stuff, the task of running ethernet cables is very approachable and feasible. At that point the time spent on it is a plus instead of a minus, and paying someone else is no longer competitive.
Well... I retrofitted a whole UK house with Cat6A, about 20 runs, longest run about 25m. The walls were dot and dab construction so quite a bit harder than drywall, but a lot easier than solid. I had my electrician brother to help for a weekend to do the cable runs. It was an entire two solid days of work just to do the runs, and this is with someone with the right tools and experience plus me having already planned it carefully. It would have taken me a week to do it alone. After that it was a full week of evenings terminating everything at both ends and another couple of weekends filling a repairing the walls. Definitely not for the faint hearted!
You are not a professional at everything and you don't know what you don't know so things that seem easy might not be and in fact could have significant dangers. A person that does the thing every week is going to be efficient and knowledgeable. It also creates jobs and supports the economy. A lot of strong independent types are frugal and arrogant and self centered to the point of being a miser.
A place I used to live had structured cabling built in and half of it was CCA. I could tell immediately when I cut the cable to terminate it just by seeing the silver ends. It even said CCA on the casing so wasn't even fake.
Electricians are definitely better than you at running cable and knowing where to cut the holes. But make sure you choose the cable and terminate it yourself.
I work with several low-voltage guys on different jobs, both new development and retrofit. It is exceedingly difficult to find good cable guys. Running parallel to romex, staples through the middle of the cable, minimum radius as a non-existent concept... Like you say, the competency is the hard part to find.
And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.
Almost all homeowners can't pay more than commercial jobs (for the same amount of billable work).
Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs.
Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)
It correlated exactly with Covid. And the folks I’m talking about are the same folks pre-covid. They didn’t retire, they’ve lost their minds, very noticeably increasing in particular over the last 3 years.
This fall is part of a steady escalation.
It appears to be heavily correlated with the insane propaganda floating around too.
>Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."
You'd have to pay me that kind of money (amortized) to deal with vetting/hiring/managing/scheduling/QC'ing someone else and their work.
> So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable
That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free.
I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge.
A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof.
The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them.
So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.
Gosh, I cannot imagine what would be unappealing about the opportunity for a tradesman to devalue the price of their labor and experience the small-but-inherent risk of catastrophic injury any time a ladder is involved in exchange for the chance to pick up a spare tenner…
(Beyond that, even if they’re already in the area, by the time they pull up the truck, load and unload the ladder and actually do the job, the per-minute rate is probably already a fair bit worse than what they would earn from real customers - it may seem to you like you’re offering an easy job at $10/minute, but it’s probably a tenth of that all in from their perspective.)
Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting.
They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.
> Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting.
> They have expenses, fuel, insurance.
I think you missed important details in their post:
>> tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes
>> tasks that are near them
The idea is, you're someone handy with equipment, and someone down the block wants lights installed. So you walk there with a couple tools on your hand, spend 5 minutes doing it, and earn (say) $20. Instead of just sitting at home and watching TV when you're bored. If you don't feel like it then you just don't take the offer up.
This is not meant to be an alternative to your day job. It's just intended to be something extra you can do when you're home anyway. If transportation and fuel and other costs would factor in then you just wouldn't do it.
It's in no way insulting, it's an opportunity for anyone that wants it. I'm not a handyman but I'd definitely do this from time to time if (say) my neighbors needed computer or coding help for a few minutes.
You shouldn’t do electrical work on someone else’s house. If it burns down and electrical is the cause as an unlicensed uninsured electrician you are going to regret that $20 you made.
Coding a web page for a neighbour is different since there are often no ramifications in the physical world if it doesn’t load or look exactly as desired
It’s not a realistic hourly rate given the overheads tradespeople have for things like insurance. Where I live a plumber is $135 for the first half hour and then $135 for every hour after that. Canadian dollars. When the phone rings off the hook at that rate who is going to bother with a $20 job.
For a 10-minute job, $20 is equivalent to $120/hr. If you feel that's too small then pretend they said $40 instead, making it $240/hr. But you're setting up strawmen here. Not every single handyman job needs >$100 insurance for a 10-minute job, and nobody is claiming this is good for plumbing or electrical jobs in particular.
Haha, I had the very same idea when I needed a similar job to be done. There are many concerns though, as quick $20 could become an evening job (i.e. 3 hours instead of 5 minutes), as some extra info may arise, and you being not qualified enough may think is ‘quick and easy.’
Although in an ideal scenario that’s a really great idea, as quite many people (I believe) may be in need of such services.
The problem is that work involves job acquisition, analysis, communication, travel and of course risk to self and risk to property. It's also not repeatable so its basically impossible to earn a living 20 here and there.
It's probably not worth it for anyone you might actually want to hire and doubly so for anything to which substantial chance of liability attaches. It might make more sense as a list of things your friends/neighbors/family could use help with playing up altruism angle and minimizing emphasise on liability. You know more like neighbor helping neighbor. You could also hopefully integrate positive things like sharing things that may still have value eg you upgraded your washing and dryer but the old set are still workable or things to do that others might want to share in so its not all a distributed version of your grandma's chore list.
Incidentally a have a great domain used for a fairly half-assed implementation of a not entirely different idea.
Pretty similar, but seems like you want the pool of people restricted to those with the tools, skills, and experience to not want to bother for that rate.
(ignoring all the other comments in this thread who are legitimately calling out these are professional services you want and your suggested price is insulting)
On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.
Same. I spent a good amount of time in our house the first fall setting up PoE cameras, which involved much time crawling around the attic. Hell of a workout and can be unpleasant but extremely doable.
Unless you're mobility limited, everything in an attic should be accessible.
The main considerations are:
- Do work when it's cold outside. Do not be up there when it's warm and sunny
- Wear a breathing mask. N95 / painter's mask works fine. Glass insulation particles aren't lethal, but also aren't stuff you want in lungs
- Think twice. Then move. Slowly. And feel you're standing on something stable before fully transferring your weight
- Mind your head. The roof plywood will likely have roofing nails sticking through
- Bring 2 lights, preferably one lantern-type. That way you can leave one en route
If it's blown insulation, you can sweep it over and expose joists to stand on.
They're regularly spaced from the exterior wall to an interior beam, all running the same direction, and the support boards up to the roof will run down to one.
I actually brought up an old LED rope that I wasn't doing anything with and just left it there unplugged for future needs. Probably will be dead by the time I need to work up there again, haha.
Mask, Gloves and a Long Sleeved shirt and it's all good.
Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.
I've always wondered if that's the old glass insulation itself, or the accumulated mouse-poop-dust embedding itself in the microscratches and freaking out your immune system.
A lifetime of accumulated pollen/dirt/mousepoop does add some extra fun though in my experience.
The reason fiberglass is itchy is because it’s piercing the epidermis. It’s basically a pad of brittle micro hypodermic needles. Add those two together, and it gets extra fun.
My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work.
SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there.
It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.
Lay some sheets of plywood down in the attic. Then you'll be able to move around easily. Up there you have direct access to the walls of your rooms so you can drill a hole and drop ethernet cable down behind the wall.
And on the plywood, go buy a 4x8 foot sheet and cut it into 4 4x2 foot sheets. These are easy to carry into your attic one or two at a time and you can lay them down as “tiles” that span 4 16in joists. Easy to just lay them down (screwed to the joists) to where you need to get and also continue extending your tiles later if you want to either get further or complete your “floor” for storage purposes. And you can still take up one tile at a time if you need to get access to something like the top side of a ceiling light fixture.
Crawlspace is better. You just make your access and then you can drill down with a flexible bit. Pass the cable down, some twine on the other side, then you only have one quick crawl to pull the cable and maybe put up some cable staples to keep it out of the way. In the attic you have to fish the cable all the way down, makes it harder.
If you're ever in the situation where you have your walls open and you want to install data cables, do yourself a favor and go nuts with some Smurf tubes. (ENT boxes and tubes.)
Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need.
Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.
>Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole
I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to.
I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms.
Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.
Just bite the bullet and crawl under the house or in the attic. I have done it many times it's not the end of the world.
The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location.
I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.
Are the two rooms on the same breaker/fuse (by some chance)? Another solution is ethernet-over-powerline where the data rides on your AC powerlines and is decoded at each end by an adapter. Supposedly they can get to the mid-hundreds of mbps, but only if they're on the same breaker. I used one in a rube-goldberg (Neighbor's WiFi)->(My Raspberry Pi, NAT Router)->(Ethernet-over-powerline)->(My WiFi Router) about 8 years ago, but the EoP was only good for a couple mbps because the signal had to go through the breaker. It was fine for poor-man's internet though.
You can get about 500Mbps at best, which is honestly fine for most uses.
That being said, I removed my EOP after I ungraded to Eero 6e's. The wireless backhaul was much faster than the wired at that point, and Eeros won't load balance between the two interfaces, so the hardwire was actually slowing things down.
Sure is handy when you need a cable and same-breaker sockets are nearby, though!
One day of dirty, sweaty work in the crawlspace, compared to possibly years of not staring at ugly cables nailed to the walls...
But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)
I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.
Definitely a great move and idea.
One thing people frequently overlook when buying higher end CAT x copper cable is the thicker the cable the more difficult (some cases impossible) to attach an RJ45 head/plug or Keystone type connector. Additionally, it can become much more difficult to flex/bend, especially if considering it in an electrical gang box for a face plate. This is why frequently you’ll see “cat 8” bulk cable for not much more than cat 6E bulk cable.
Maybe you can have a friend stick his head into the attic at the destination, while you stick your head up at the origin, then you just tie the cable end to a basketball and throw it through the attic for your friend to catch.
the amount of effort that your will to put into this to not enter your attic is absolutely astounding. by the time you finished formulating even a basic plane to fly a drone to run a cable and displace all of your blown in insulation you could have simply run the cable.
it's not that hard to only step on the joists in the attic, if it was built to code. if you don't want to crawl in the crawlspace, pay someone else to do it for you.
Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.
20 Mb/s is terrible. Sure, it'll work in some sense, but I'd go mad if that's the best I could get. A good wifi setup is way better than a cabled 20 Mb/s unless you absolutely need consist and better latency for some reason.
He said hard to reach places. If an old house has CAT4 in the basement, I'll take the lower pings, reliability, and at worst I'll WebDAV. Unless your home server is in the basement I can't see a normal realistic scenario where the data transfer isn't sufficient.
If you get old equipment to go with your old cabling, ethernet is not necessarily switched. 10 and 100 can be run as a shared medium.
Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.
1. It's not enough when you're on an active connection doing other things at the same time as the video. Live streams at full quality will use a third to half of 20Mbps and demand very little interruption. Loading a single page with a few images can interfere. And even dedicated 20Mbps, with tightly encoded content, can be too little for 4k.
2. The idea in the comment is streaming at original bluray quality. Not transferring.
20Mb/s is enough? Is this a joke? A single youtube full HD stream can reach 7Mb/s. Literallywatching a youtube movie and doing something else will saturate that link. In fact I think it's so low it will negatively impact basic website loading time. Just going to reddit.com loads 18.2 MB of resources. This will take about 8 seconds on your "useable for everything".
My internet connection has 15Mb/s down Thank you very much. So while I'm not your parent I can totally see how that 20 is totally fine. So if you are in a corner of the house you can't get Wifi to that's on par why not use that cable if it exists?
Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No.
Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basement room? Absolutely.
Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.
How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.
The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.
I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.
Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.
Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.
Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?