Home Network

One of the needs in a home for my roommates and I was ethernet cables in the walls. This was mainly to keep the apartment clean looking while remaining connected.

Thankfully our landlord was willing to let me conduct the upgrade to the apartment. He reimbursed me for the materials and even provided the tools I needed!

This whole endeavor was possible because the original house used CAT 5 cables for phone line. So, for the first step I simply replaced the wall plates, and crimped on the connectors to the wires.

Next, I used a crimp tool and RJ45 connectors to set the cables up at the junction box. I used a electrical toner to identify were each ethernet cable went, and labeled them. This allowed us to omit the wires that ran out to the exterior of the house and focus on wiring all internal cables. We used a 7 port ethernet switch to connect the crimped cables.

However, every conversion like this doesn't come without its snags. I noticed that one of the ports for the living room only had the orange and blue twisted pairs connected. I had double checked the pinning on either end and made an interesting discovery. The cables were different colors!

This gave me a good indication that there was a junction somewhere along the line.

This was confirmed in the ceiling of one of the down stair bathrooms where the original contractors used wire nuts to tie the two cables together! I ended up tying together the remaining cables with wire nuts, and that worked!

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