[khiser]

I am building a house and I had the electrician run 2+2 structured wire during the framing process and stated that I would be doing the wiring and supplying my own jacks. (My father is the General Contractor)


I go to look at the house the other day and notice that the electrician had put jacks in throughout the house. Oh well I think.."This will save me some time" I then notice that they wired the basement central location as well and realized that they did not do this correctly. What they have done is wired all the video correctly (as if they could mess that up) BUT they wired all of the cat5e jacks as phone lines? Now that they have stripped the jacket away and untwisted the twisted pairs I am very pissed off. Is this salvageable? I am thinking that if I get new RJ45 jacks (since they put in RJ11) and re twist the pairs and add some heat shrink jacket to them I might be able to save an installation that is now worthless.


Am I correct in this thought? (God I hope so) Here are some pictures of the work that they did so you can see my concern at where the Cat5e terminates.


1. Picture of a jack pulled from the wall. Notice that all twisted pairs are there but the jacket has been removed and some of the twisted pairs are not "twisted". Can I retwist these, heat shrink, and terminate on RJ45 cable?

http://www.wdcohio.com/ebay/jack.jpg


2. Image of the basement wiring job:

http://www.wdcohio.com/ebay/patch1.jpg


3. Close up of the patch block:

http://www.wdcohio.com/ebay/patch2.jpg


Can I save this? If not I am not sure what I could have the electrician do to compensate for not having this capability in my house as the house is going to be done around the 20th of this month.


Aggghhh...I hope someone smarter than I can tell me if this is salvageable.


Thanks in advance,

Kevin

 

[John P]

Appears you can redo the wall jack and be OK, just keep the pairs twisted up to the connector. Replacing the jacket with heatshrink should not be necessary.


The basement is another problem. You might be able to use the product below (click link) by mounting two of them one over each bundle of cables at the top of the back board. Or possibly mount one vertically between the bundles of cables. It will be necessary to peel back more of the the jacket to expose extra cable. Leave the phone connections in place and connect the ethernet cables to the patch panels.

http://www.pimfg.com/product_detail.....TXT&web_spec=


Good luck.

 

[robertmee]

I hope you had the scope of work with these guys in writing. If so, I would meet with a manager/foreman and show them the fubar. I wouldn't touch a thing and have them fix it correctly.


Robert

 

[khiser]

Robert,


The issue is that they were not to do anything with the wire after it was run. I was going to do everything. At this point I am not sure I want them to do anything else as I do not think they understand why they ran the 2+2.


Is the wire screwed or can I retwist the short distance of wire that they have untwisted?


Thanks,

Kevin

 

[emcgrath]

You can retwist the TP and it'll be fine.

I really don't like the metal staples though. It'll probably be fine but it is NOT recommended to use metal staples for these kind of installations.

 

[khiser]

Is there anyway that when I retwist them that I can verify they are twisted at the right amount? What are going to be the potential drawbacks? (Slower than 100 MBS? Not work? Etc?) Once I have retwisted the pairs should I heat shrink them to keep them twisted? (I have had one person say it is not required but I wonder if they would become loose twists over time.)


I plan to take the whole thing apart in the basement and use a 48 port patch panel and based on the wire that is left at the top I will just need to mount it high on the wall so I can cut off all of the stuff they untwisted. I assume this will work fine as it would be done the way that it should have been done originally.


Am I thinking correctly?

 

[arjo_reich]

all I can say is good luck. They really screwed you on your panel, the individual ports will easier to fix but really...if you have it in the work order, I would tell them they screwed the pooch and you want them to rewire the whole damn thing.


I'd rather be an a-hole and have it done correctly then try to cope with someone else's in ability to follow a work order.

 

[khiser]

Thanks. The work order said to do nothing and rewiring would really be out of the question as the house is now almost complete.


The panel I think will be the easiest to fix as There is still plenty of wire even if I cut off all the crap that they did to it. It will just require me to put my patch panel at the very top which is not the look I wanted since I was going to do everything in an enclosure between the studs.


So at the ports are you thinking I should retwist? What about the heat shrink over that as mentioned above?


All of your input is helpful as it has been a depressing day

 

[TotallyPreWired]

Quote:

Originally Posted by khiser ...What are going to be the potential drawbacks? (Slower than 100 MBS? Not work? Etc?)

I assume that you mean Mbs.


What's hard to believe, with structured wiring becoming the norm, is how they could misinterpret the 2 + 2 cable. I'll bet that they scratched their heads, Hmmm 2 cables, I really only need one for 4 lines, Hmmm, well they're there, so I guess I better use them both.


Just do a decent job of retwisting the wires, and I think that you'll be fine.


What is that huge stream of wires heading off to the left? Maybe it's best not to ask? It only looks like they wired 2 lines(the same) for each jack, so 2 pair from the demarc should do it. Hmmm. I guess that I just do things a bit differently.

Quote:

Once I have retwisted the pairs should I heat shrink them to keep them twisted? (I have had one person say it is not required but I wonder if they would become loose twists over time.)

I wouldn't.


On the positive side, it doesn't look like they did a bad job, just not the desired job.

....jc

 

[khiser]

Thanks. The wires to the left are the two RG6 cables. The funny thing is they told my father that they hooked up the black ones for video and the white for internet.


Being that they are nothing but a homerun cable they could be anything Heck if I used the white for internet that means I would need 13 cable modems to serve the whole house with internet access.


Oh well. It seems as though the general thought is that I can retwist and be fine. This is better than I thought as last nights research on the net stated to not untwist or retwist cat5 cable.


I hope this all works out ok.

 

[emcgrath]

I wouldn't obsess about it. The twisting just helps cut down on interference. It's kind of a poor man's shielding. If you don't twist the last 2" of 100' of wire it's not going to make a difference. What I would do is to retwist the wire, punch it down and stop worrying about it.


The other thing I would do is to leave one of the terminated cat5's a rj11 for phone and just change out one for rj45 for data. The same at the other end. I'd use a block like they did for the phone connections and use a patch panel for the data connections. But that's just my opinion. I think rj11 works better for phone use.

 

[wjchan]

"Wire pairs should not be untwisted any more than necessary. The typical maximum [cat5] specification is 1/2 inch but most consider that a lot. 1/4 inch is preferred."


If you are worried, you should go rent a highend cable tester that does freqiency sweeps and see if the cable runs meet 100mb/1gb spec.

 

[khiser]

Thanks everyone!

 

[EricD]

Why did you run 2 runs of cat5? Will you be running gigabit? If not you could use one cable for network and keep the other one for phones as 100mb over cat5 only uses 4 of the 8 wires.

 

[emcgrath]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wjchan "Wire pairs should not be untwisted any more than necessary. The typical maximum [cat5] specification is 1/2 inch but most consider that a lot. 1/4 inch is preferred." If you are worried, you should go rent a highend cable tester that does freqiency sweeps and see if the cable runs meet 100mb/1gb spec.

OR you could just twist it and see that it works just fine. Come on guys, give this guy a break. He's already worried for no reason. If the last two inches of a 100 foot cable are twisted at 1/3 or 1/5 or 1/1 makes no difference on a cable rated at 100 METERS. There is no way that this is a problem.