When I was 15, my dad purchased me a plaster saw (still have it) and handed me his drill.
Then told me to make it look neat, but “don’t fuck up because your mother will kill us both”.
I ran about 4 network points through the house.
Nothing like fear to produce a 100% perfect finish 😉
And then there’s me who just screwed up installing a new door knob. I stripped the threads on the screws cause I used the wrong size screws drilling. Now if the new knob fails in the future, I need to buy a new door lmao
If it’s a wooden door that you’re screwing into, dab some match sticks with a little bit of liquid nails and gently hammer them into the stripped-out screw hole, and cut them flush with the hole. Once the glue dries, you can drive the screw back into the matches and it’ll have enough wood to bite into.
assuming liquid nails means molten metal, I don’t think that’s easily accessible in most homes
you can buy liquid nails at like any home depot type of store
Is it a US thing?
no - I think you’re taking the name of the product too literally. it’s a really strong adhesive. you can use it to fill small holes since it hardens like a mfer
No, I believe it just a really strong PVA glue
People are getting hung up on the “liquid nails” when I think any old carpenter’s glue would work.
You don’t even need any adhesive if you simply shove in a toothpick or two before screwing in the screw. Remember: you don’t need to completely fill the hole, just enough to fill in the space between the too-big screw and the right-sized screw
This is true in many cases - just break up some toothpicks or matchsticks to partially fill the over enlarged hole, and drive the screw right in.
Often for small repairs like that, the pressure and friction of the wood being compressed is more than enough to hold.
I’m new to DIY home fixes. Will try this out cause I am, using a wooden door. Thanks for the tip!
I’m tempted to do this, do you have any tips?
If you can, re-use existing sockets! Old telephone or antenna lines can work! You tie the cable to the end of the old cable and pull it through the existing PVC pipe.
That’s exactly what I am about to do in the house we’re signing for in few weeks (waiting for the attorney to give us an appointment).
When I saw the phone jack’s in every room, all terminating down in the garage, I just figured it would be rude not too. Seeing as we will have 2Gb fibre, it makes sense
Using old phone lines is exactly what I did for my parents house, worked like a charm. Highly recommend if you don’t need the phone lines anymore.
Even if you do need a couple, run Cat6 anyway. RJ15 is a subset of RJ45, so it is simply a question of how you patch it at the other end.
This was an older stumped house. The way I did it was to remove a power point, look in the wall cavity for where the cable came up out of the floor in the cavity space, and then assuming there was no obstruction, I then got under the floor and drilled up. In most cases I was able to stay a good 20cm or so away from the power cable. Worked a charm. I was paranoid if I got it wrong I’d be drilling right up through the actual floor.
Nowadays, doing the same at my own house… Cut the plaster. Run cable. Patch plaster. No stuffing around with the slowly slowly approach 🤷♂️
Nowadays, doing the same at my own house… Cut the plaster. Run cable. Patch plaster. No stuffing around with the slowly slowly approach 🤷♂️
Go ahead and pull em in the wall! Don’t be scared. Worst case the world is ending anyways
Well that’s reassuring
Damn, you’re right.
Damn. When you look at it that way, I could probably justify attempting a lot of difficult things that way. Thanks!
I holes in your pants became fashionable, so too can holes in your walls!
Nah we got rings and plates to look all pretty. May be a couple extra blank plates in your house once it’s all said and done depending on how hard it is to fish wires around, but, again the world is ending so it’s cool
For me it was like
Join forces and do link aggregation for double the speeds.
LACP won’t get ya double throughput sadly.
As windows and other software is getting smarter, more things are creating multiple streams to push data, which definitely does let two-link aggregation (nearly) double throughput
A tale as old as time. Before Ethernet cables we were running phone extension cables through the house to connect up the modem to the only phone jack.
I am old enough to remember those good old days!
I did this for every device in my house. used flat ethernet cable and just fished it under the carpets. Was significantly cheaper than trying to make wireless reach the other side of the house.
Flat ethernet cable
What?!! I did not know this existed!!
Yeah they’re great! I got a super long flat white one and those little white plastic staple things you can lightly hammer into the wall, and ran it along the baseboard of the walls, makes it nearly invisible! It was a bit tedious to do (which is why I haven’t yet redone it in the place I live now, although I will), but honestly I super recommend it. My partner wanted to try and run cords through the walls but I was way too nervous about what might go wrong, so found this solution instead lol
You can also buy devices you plug into the wall and route your network through your power network. Used them to give my detached garage wifi. Works pretty well.
Can be unreliable though based on what else is on the circuit. Had a portable ac that completely took my power line ethernet connection out whenever it ran.
Based on my research, you get the speed of 2.4 ghz wireless (which while it works, it could be better) with the inconvenience of having to use a cable. Performance also depends on wire insulation, which often isn’t built for running PLC. However, you can’t beat the “plug-and-play” of wired there, which might be attractive.
I’d recommend getting a mesh router setup, gives you 5ghz wireless over the whole house (assuming proper setup), and some mesh points support wired output (effectively having a wireless bridge)
I can either spend $20 on the cable or you can pay $2000 for a professional to buy it and stick it in the wall.
Having one ethernet cable run by an electrician isn’t that expensive. I had someone run one for me to my office for like 150 bucks since my ISP wouldn’t run fiber to it.
I got an electrician and they just told me to hire a drywall guy (only half kidding)
anybody can cut some holes in the wall. it takes skill to fix it.
Oh hello, it’s the electrician I hired 👋
I had to buy carpets to hide the cable under them when running across the floor. Only exposed parts go through the doorways, and the wife complains about them. Well, I am not complaining about our craptastic wifi anymore.
If you own your house you could learn to pull cable and how to do punchdowns. It’s not a super difficult job. That way you could impress the lady of the house with your technical skills while also hiding the mess.
In my experience, the part about hiding the mess is all she cared about, as long as “the internet still works.”
But you will always look at that wall jack and feel great about it while always having the lowest latency and highest throughput you can possibly get, and that will always impress yourself!
Honestly for newbies I always recommend inline couplers instead of punchdowns. Still meets electrical code in areas where you can’t run a cable through a wall (wiring only) and allows for the use of non-crimped cables so the barrier to entry is far lower. It’s not like most houses are at risk of hitting the length limits for Ethernet runs anyway.
I’d be careful giving broad advice like this.
In my country (Australia) it’s illegal to run cabling yourself unless you’re a registered cabler.
Even low voltage? That’s kinda crazy to me.
I’m sorry you live in authoritariansville.
Even for an Ethernet cable? Surely not.
I seem to remember that yes, it was even for low voltage data cabling.
Not that I would imagine anyone’s enforcing it strongly
I think the enforcement would come with insurance when your house burns down, they can point at “unlicensed” cables
Would they be able to prove it wasn’t installed by a licensed contractor? Ok, if you have it installed legally then you’ll likely have an invoice/receipt, but if you lose it that doesn’t mean the cable is illegal. So if you did it yourself, how would they know it’s not just a case of a missing invoice?
I’m not saying it would go anywhere, but with how scummy insurance companies are they might try it. Still, it’s a bullshit law
You learn something new every day. That’s insane!
You could just use 2 Ethernet Over Power adaptors (not to be confused with power over ethernet).
After all, it’s not as if the powerlines aren’t already installed at home and connect all power plugs with all other power plugs.
This isn’t even new: I’ve been using this solution for about a decade, back when it could do a mere 20Mb/s (which was still way faster than my Internet connection could handle back then ;))
Unless having a 500Mb/s limit on bandwith is somehow unacceptable when you could have Gigabit ethernet. Then again, why not fibre all the way ;)
Have you ever paid attention to packet loss?
Honest question, because I’m an electrician and Ethernet is so fickle, I’ve always assumed it would play hell on the overall quality.
The whole thing is layered into multiple levels (go check the OSI Model and its Layers on Wikipedia if you’re willing to go down that specific information hole ;)) and the physical layer should mainly be handling packet loss on the connection between those adaptors, transparently to the higher layers that just see that as lower bandwidth than the spec for the adaptors (a spec which is really quite optimistic, IMHO).
Yeah, a cable with a metal sheaf wired to the GND level (i.e. Cat cable) is going to be way better at higher frequencies and at isolation from noise that two twisted copper wires were the network signal is shared with a different “signal” which whilst generally 50/60Hz (depending on country) can have spikes and noise at other frequencies, so it’s never going to be the same.
However for example at home right now I can get a reliable 100 Mbit/s over a pair of those adaptors from my router to my PC and the speed limitation is actually (I believe) from my old router not supporting Gigabit Ethernet rather than from the adaptors which are supposed to handle up to 500 Mbit/sec.
That said and as somebody pointed out, it only works well if the plugs you’re connecting are on the same electrical network, as transversing coils isn’t exactly great for high frequency signals.
it only works well if the plugs you’re connecting are on the same electrical network, as transversing coils isn’t exactly great for high frequency signals.
What does “electrical network” mean? Panel? Circuit?
If two plugs are connected to different circuit breakers, then they’re in different “electrical networks” in this sense: basically for a signal to go from one such plug to the other one it has to transverse both circuit breakers and that means going through coils.
Coils are inductors, which are electrical elements which have have frequency dependent resistance (in simple terms), with the higher the frequency of a signal the more the resistance they offer to the passing of a signal, and the higher the bandwidth of your data connection the higher the frequency of the signal(s) necessary to transport that data.
So electrical network == circuit, got it.
I learned this stuff in a different language so don’t really know the right terminology in English.
Also I’m from the Electronics side, so for me a “circuit” is something quite different ;)
Ah, in home electrical, a circuit generally means the same thing as electronics, but at 120V and around 15A (in North America).
It definitely can be finicky. I had a portable ac that completely killed the power line ethernet connection when it ran. And my current house I have it in i use from where my router is to where my main TV is and it is unreliable even without that AC unit. So it definitely depends on the circumstances.
I used ehternof power for many years and although I didn’t look at packet loss I never had a problem with it.
My experience is that you need to be sure the outlets are on the same electrical network, otherwise it doesn’t work. When I did get it to work it seemed to be reliable.
Are you…are you in the walls?
Worth it every time.
Easy I have either cable but no family, my PC is happy too :)
It’s either deal with the distance with a wireless network (which can’t even reach my current bedroom in my house) or deal with concrete walls that also cuts down the Wi-Fi signal in my new bedroom.
Then again, my home’s network is due for an upgrade because it’s 17 years old, so I just need to convince my family to upgrade to CAT6 cabling and a faster Wi-Fi router.
upgraded to a 3 node G mesh. it just works x10 years https://store.google.com/product/google_wifi_2nd_gen?hl=en-US
They let me go in the attic and run the internet line into my room (it was a 75ft cable). Now we use 5G, but are planning direct fiber once our city halves cost for service.
I was staying with some friends and we were all Computer users and gamers, Ethernet cables sprawled across the floor to every room in the place, and when we got tired of tripping over it, we duct taped them down to the floor where they stayed until we moved out.
This is the way.
