|
Home
Tradespeople
Useful
Links
Sermons
Sources
|
|
On Phone
Wiring
I've done a fair amount of phone wiring; it's pretty easy. The hardest
part is putting wires through the wall. If you're going straight up/down
it's easy. Otherwise you end up cutting through joists and it's very messy.
There's two other ways to do it. One, the cheap student way, is just to
run the phone cable along the floor or molding or whatever. You can get
a $.49 box of staples to tack/hold down the wire. I've found this works
best as a two-person job -- one person to maintain tension on the wire,
one to hammer.
The expensive homeowner way is to use the on-wall wiring system. These
are boxes and pieces of conduit which you buy and which secure to walls,
molding, etc. you then run wires through them. Much neater, MUCH more
expensive. A one-person installation job.
Hooking up the outside line to the in-house system should be accomplished
at the point where the wires enter the house. The phone company is responsible
for getting a dialtone to a box inside your house. Beyond that it's your
problem. You'll likely need to hook the wires they provide to something
like a bridge box, which distributes the signal from the phone company
wires to the wires in your house. Likely you have one already if your
house is modern enough. If not, they're cheap to get and easy to install.
--Alan
Homeport just went through a complete phone rewire. We bought a PBX at
auction, and now we have extensions and intercoms and pretty phones with
buttonlights and everything all throughout the house. Unfortunately, this
requires a 4 wire run to -every- spot where a phone was needed, all the
way back to the switch in the basement. (in normal POTS phones - an acronym
for 'plain old telephone service' - phones can be on a 'bus'. That is,
to add another extension, just tap into the middle two wires on a 4 wire
line (red and green, aka Tip and Ring), and voila, you have another phone.
In digital phone systems, wires have to run from each extension back to
the main switch, without other phones on the line)
Anyway. I got Real Good [tm] at shimmying wires through walls. Basements
and attics are your friends for this. For baseboard wiring - ala, where
we had to put a jack where there wasn't one already, we used junction
boxes purchased from U-Do-It. These are overkill for most phone installations,
but it's pretty much the same no matter how much wire you're using. Find
where you want to put the phone connection, and coordinate that position
with the basement or attic above/below the place where the jack is going.
Make sure you have access to the top or bottom of the wall (we used the
basement for most of our runs). Punch a hole in the plaster wall with
a big augerbit on a drill - depending on the type of jack, the hole can
be from a half an inch to 2 inches across. Go down to the (for this example,
we'll just use..) the basement, and drill up through the floor into the
bottom of the wall. Depending on construction, this'll either be one,
two, or three layers of wood (subflooring,
flooring, base joist). Use a long bit, a good drill, and make sure you're
centered! it's best to have someone upstairs watching to make sure you
don't come out into the molding.
Once you break through, you can use a snake (no, the metal kind) to fish
up from the basement through the hole int eh wall you made - or the other
way, whichever works better. Once the snake is through, pull string through,
then wire, and you're on the way to your phone jack.
We actually have a good wire snake, which is reallllly handy. In a pinch,
bent coathanger will do.
Once the wire is pulled through, you can wire in your spiffy new jack
- black - red - green - yellow. For 1 line phones, just use red/green,
for two lines, the middle pair (R/G) is line one, the outside pair (B/Y)
is the second line. Again, for POTS service, the order of the pairs doesn't
matter (in modern phones, it doesn't matter which is tip and which is
ring, but if you're anal about these things, red is tip.)
Anyway. That got longer-winded than i wanted, but it is the basics of
phone hookup. You can get as simple or as fancy as you want mounting the
jacks on the walls. Whadya wanna do?
--Shayde
Back to top
|