How to Wire Your House With Cat-5 (or 6) For Ethernet Networking

Step 3 Mounting the Wall Plates

Since I knew the path my cable TV took and they were in all the same locations that I wanted my ethernet jacks, I just located my cable TV jacks to start. Using the stud finder I was able to tell which side of the cable jack the stud was located on. Studs are located 16" apart in almost all homes and I knew I wanted my ethernet to go in the same wall cavity as the cable TV.

Now that you've decided where to mount the box, you need to draw the lines on the wall to fit the new box and cut the hold with the pointed hand saw. The pointed saw should be able to push through the dry wall pretty easily without the need to drill starter holes.

Once you have the hole cut in the wall, you can put the single gang box into the hole and screw the clamps with hold it in place by clamping to the back of the dry wall.

Repeat this for each location that you want to run to.

For now we'll leave the wall plates off.

At this time you'll also want to cut a hole in the wall in the distribution room. Here you want to cut a hole that the plastic grommet will fit into.

Now we can run cables!

Comments

[dcastor]

You didn't mention installation of the rails shown in the second picture here in your laundry room to accommodate the patch panel and shelf.  What are those called?  I'm trying to do the same type of install.

[iamtoats]

Thats called a rack. 
They are commonly used for pro-audio.
He kinda went overkill on the amount of rack space...

[RoadieRich]

 It's impossible to have too much rack space.

[Rogue Agent]

Yeah, I got a telco rack for helping a buddy out with some stuff.  Again, cost me nothing.  Lots of friends working at lots of tech companies lets you get lots of old equipment for free.  Right now its mounted to the wall (which isn't what its deisgned for).  Its meant to be free standing.

[snowmanII]

You could have spared the extra hole and just added 6 hole keystone plate and ran your lan wires through the cable box.

[Entropy512]

This is how I did it in my parents house.  We replaced each coax-only wallplates with wallplates that had 4 keystone module holes each.  1 holes was filled with an F connector barrel, the second with a Cat5 jack, the last two with blank plates for future expansion.

The exception was in the entertainment room - My parents already had two speaker wires coming up from the floor to the stereo system.  These were moved six inches so they came up through the wall where the coax came up from the basement, and went to RCA jacks in the 3rd and 4th holes in that wallplate.

It's a MUCH easier approach than adding wallplates if you're doing the "Cat5 only to places with a coax drop already" approach!

[joebananas]

Would the "replace existing wall plate" approach not be appropriate with Cat6 or multiple Cat6 drops?

[Entropy512]

I don't see why not - I used Leviton QuickPort plates in my parents house, and they have Cat6 QuickPort jacks.

For multi-drop Cat5/6 you'd need to get a 4 or 6-port wallplate (1 for the old coax, 2+ for the multiple Cat5/6 jacks, but they don't have 3/5 port plates.)