POE Patch Panel

by neokleon

11K154

Intro: POE Patch Panel

Providing power to passive POE equipment via 12/24 V & ~2Amp power adapter is some times very difficult. The bulky power adapter lies around or hanged on wall improperly. It is clean to provide electricity via the LAN cable. It will not create any junk of wires in the place. For the purpose i have made a POE patch panel, from a 48 port 2U rack mounted patch panel, bought from local market around 38$ (3800 PKR), and retrofitted to a passive POE patch panel. The scheme is simple.

STEP 1: Requirements

For making 24 port POE patch panel

48 Port 2U rack mount Patch panel
network cable pairs.
Female power connector.
5mm heat shrink.
cable ties
power cable joiner (20-30 Amps)
Soldering Gun
Network tools

STEP 2: Winding

Winding is very simple. (also see intro picture)

you have to join LAN port 1 with LAN port 25, so upper & lower LAN ports make a couple. LAN port 1 is DATA+POWER port so its 1,2,3,6 are connected (patched) with LAN port 25's 1,2,3,6. While LAN port 1's 4,5 are +ve & 7,8 are -ve connections combining at the end (all 24 ports) and attached to female power connector and carries current to AP via single LAN cable.

The procedure is simple enough but time consuming.

STEP 3: Miscellenous Pics for Thorough Look In

Raw images in making of POE Patch Panel.

4 Comments

guymark 8 years ago

A couple of quickies - not only is this a very helpful indestructible but some people might be put off by some of the caveats others have offered.

First of all, assuming the voltage is nominally 48v, then items will take what current they require. Connecting the supplies in parallel will not force less power hungry devices to consume more. That isn't how it works. Just like if you connect a tiny little 12v bulb and a hulking great starter motor to a battery - each device will take just as much current as it needs.

As for the phones, although it *may* harm digital / hybrid phones, 48v will not damage a regular phone line - in fact it is exactly 48v that a normal telephone will see when on-hook. When the handset is lifted the voltage normally would then drop to 12v to trigger the exchange to provide dial tone. Here, picking up the handset would clearly not trigger the exchange but the phone would not be damaged - it simply wouldn't work.

A slight mod to this would be to punch down all the negatives and common them up - but take the positives and connect each one via a 250mA resettable wire ended fuse and THEN common them up. (They are about 20p / 30c each). If you search for "250ma resettable fuse" on a popular auction site, you will very quickly find what you want.

Cheap, wire ended for convenience and auto-resettable too. :)

mr.incredible 9 years ago

Looks good. One very big mistake I see here, is you have too much insulation stripped off the cables themselves. Your insulation and twist need to go as close to the end as possible. Part of what makes Cat5e and Cat6 able to carry the speeds it does is through the twist in the pairs and the twist of the pairs around each other. Noise is cancelled as data travels through the twist. That is why Cat3 and regular Cat5 will not carry data above 10baseT.

You also have to be careful about the amperage at each port. Some POE devices need more current than others. If you have them all wired together they will all get the same current and possibly damage devices of lesser need. Under current on the more needy devices can have the same effect. This is why POE switches aren't cheap. They have current limiting circuits built-in. (The better ones anyway)

neokleon 9 years ago

I am using ubiquiti m2s.no worries for amprres.
also speed is not an issue coz wifi is only upto 150mbps.and this threshhold will never be reached in my scenario.