wiring house without existing wires question. hardware and recommendations

[PolarBear]

If the codes in your jurisdiction allow it, one way of wiring would be to run empty plastic conduit from your central location to empty wall boxes in each room, before the walls are finished.

You could leave the conduit empty for now, or with a piece of string inside to help pull through cables later.

If this solution will work for your use case, it's really having your cake and eating it. It removes most of the difficulty of running cable later on, and also avoids the expense of running cable which you might want to replace in 15 years, even though it was never used in the meantime.

(By sheer good luck rather than planning, we found the empty tube we had already laid under the new living room floor was wide enough to pull through an HDMI cable bought off the shelf, already terminated with plugs on each end. I was very happy that day )

PolarBear

 

[System Error Message]

I will chip in i guess. If a house is already built and you dont want too much work you can use corners to hide cabling or use a cover to get your cables around, makes for an easy repair but there will still be some drilling to get cables into rooms.

2 cables per room is a good number however there are various things you may want to think about for some rooms. For example where you place your TV or have internet access coming into the house, you may want more cables there. Think of where you will be placing things and add panels appropriately. For example for wifi, this would mean you have enough ports for the wifi APs and other devices in the same room and while consumer router APs have 4 port switches it is the link between the AP and central switch that can be come a bottleneck if you use the 4 port switch especially with today's wifi AC speeds and with multiple users.

For some places, maybe one cable is enough, perhaps to place an AP or maybe even for smart home/security devices. Use as little cabling as you can as if you ever decide to go with a POE switch longer cables could hurt.

You also need to think about your budget and central switch. How many ports do you want? 1G or 10G? Think of your central switch as the most important point, ideally you want a really good switch for it. If this is a home network at least get semi managed/smart but if you can and dont mind the effort, go with fully managed. The central switch will be where your router and servers/services based devices will be (like NAS).

Patch panels are just conductors for you to connect cables. As long as they connect all pairs all that matters is whether it is a twisted or untwisted pair (basically if the ends are the same or opposite as the other end) and this also applies for cables as if you take 2 twisted pairs and put them together you get an untwisted pair.

You can buy a switch with 24 ports but still wire the house with more wires and use a bigger patch panel. Just make sure you label well and connect what you need first. This is one way to make a good wired networked on a budget.

 

[EngChi]

Thank you System Error Message for detailed response. I am thinking through the central switch selection as well as patch panel - speaking of which, any vendor/sellers recommendations for patch panels?

For switching I am considering LB6M from natex pull as I am reading serverthehome threads of people's experiences with it.

http://www.natex.us/Quanta-LB6M-Switch-p/quanta-lb6m.htm

 

[System Error Message]

Thank you System Error Message for detailed response. I am thinking through the central switch selection as well as patch panel - speaking of which, any vendor/sellers recommendations for patch panels?

For switching I am considering LB6M from natex pull as I am reading serverthehome threads of people's experiences with it.

http://www.natex.us/Quanta-LB6M-Switch-p/quanta-lb6m.htm

That switch should be fine. For patch panels its just a matter of conductors so just pick one that doesnt skimp on materials the better. Like with vintage things, the heavier it feels the better it must be (unless its filled with lead).

One thing you could do with patching is that you could add protection which is essentially just a bunch of diodes. Ethernet port protectors have popped up which are just diods but i dont they they are rated to handle lightning.