15 ms·

I wanted wired Ethernet in my office but didn't want to punch holes in the wall. Luckily I have an old "central vacuum system" that as far as I can tell has nev

• robotnikman 4y ago
  Other alternatives I've found to work are Ethernet over power (varies depending on how well your house is wired though) and ethernet over coax using MoCA adapters (if your house was previously wired with coax for cable TV these work great)
  • bin_bash 4y ago
    MoCA adapters are crazy expensive though
    • mason55 4y ago
      It's true but you might not need that many. Our house was built in 2000 and every room is wired with coax but no ethernet. With some strategic placement I was able to get a hardwired switch in my office + two hardwired wifi APs with just two MoCA adapters - $300 well spent. It would be pretty expensive to turn every coax run in my house into a hardwired ethernet switch but well placed hardwired APs obviates the need to do that.
      • chrisweekly 4y ago
        Yeah; I'm about to upgrade the backhaul on my Orbi mesh system to be wired, via extant coax nodes in good locations.
    • themitigating 4y ago
      A gocoax 1gbit is $60
      • ILMostro7 4y ago
        But you need (at least) two, in order to be useful at all.
        • themitigating 4y ago
          Hi, yes that's true but to compare pricing you need to think of the cost of cat6 cable, which isn't much. Also the time to run the cable. This is assuming you have coax rg6 or better already in the wall
    • chime 4y ago
      Hard to compare what "crazy" expensive is but I bought a pair of these for $90 https://amazon.com/dp/B01MRV4WA1 https://amazon.com/dp/B01MRV4WA1. For the 3 places in my house I wanted to wire with Ethernet, I was done under $300. Patching drywall, paint touch-ups, new cables, and the overall time and headache would have cost a lot more. I was done in a matter of minutes using old coax and these adapters. In my case, I didn't build a MoCA network, just used these devices point-to-point. If you go full MoCA, think of it like a distributed hub - no switching, no routing, no security. In fact you should put filters to prevent neighbors from listening in using their own MoCA adapters. For me, point-to-point worked. YMMV but Ethernet over Coax is definitely worth looking into for upto 1gbps speed, which is plenty for wifi, netflix etc.
      • walterbell 4y ago
        > In fact you should put filters to prevent neighbors from listening in using their own MoCA adapters. Wow. Who knew that inbound cable internet has outbound data capability? Thanks for posting. Is this a suitable filter (-70db)? https://www.amazon.com/GLP-1G70CWWS-Filter-Eliminate-Multi-Room-Interference/dp/B08HJ4F4D4 https://www.amazon.com/GLP-1G70CWWS-Filter-Eliminate-Multi-R...
        • trelane 4y ago
          > Who knew that inbound cable internet has outbound data capability? The physical medium isn't directional, so there's no reason to assume it would not transmit and receive. A coax cable is equivalent to three wires with better isolation from the environment (and with one "wire" usually used for ground). There's an asymmetry in commercial broadband over coax, but Im not sire why that is precisely. Perhaps someone familiar with DOCSIS etc. could say.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      In my case I used just a single pair of them to get wired Gigabit up to my second floor from the basement. Based on my layout and needs that got me everything I couldn't easily handle with Ethernet runs. Ethernet runs are cheaper in parts, but MoCA adapters are crazy effective at avoiding large drywalling jobs.
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    I've used Ethernet over Power, and it sucks except under ideal conditions. The pre-G.hn versions are quite slow. G.hn is fast, but all of the G.hn devices I've found seem to use the same chipset (and presumably similar firmware, since the configuration pages have identical options, but different branding), and the chipset seems to buffer a massive amount, which means a single hiccup while using a high-bandwidth application makes the network unusable for a while. Example: while streaming video over a G.hn adapter, I was running ping. There was a brief hiccup, and then ping times exceeded 20 seconds (!!), finally recovering after a few minutes. I eventually ran a program that ran on devices connected to each side and would reboot the adapter if ping times exceeded 500ms. This made the network far more reliable.
    • gabereiser 4y ago
      This hasn’t been my experience at all. I use TP-Link adapters and don’t see any ping interference or latency. I think it also has a lot to do with how in phase your power is.
      • aidenn0 4y ago
        Which TP-Link adapters? They don't seem to make a g.hn and the last ones of them I tried were AV1000.
        • gabereiser 4y ago
          It’s the AV1000s. I don’t seem to have the issues you all are reporting with them. No packet loss. No latency beyond a reasonable 1ms. My apartment’s power lines are clean, properly grounded, and perfectly in phase I guess.
          • aidenn0 4y ago
            AV1000 worked reliably for me, but at 40mbit
          • Johnythree 4y ago
            Sorry, but no. All it takes is for a neighbour to plug in a noisy appliance to wipe out your network. The problem with P/L is that it can work, until suddenly it doesn't.
  • garaetjjte 4y ago
    Note that Ethernet over power should also work on coax, or really any other cable. (connect adapters to the wire and feed it with eg. 48V power supply)
    • ta988 4y ago
      Not really the newer ones use the 3 wires (phase, neuter and earth). I have one and reach 400-600Mbps in a really old building with really long and shitty cabling. Ping is 5ms more than pure Ethernet though.
• wpietri 4y ago
  Now that's a proper series of tubes.
• Arrath 4y ago
  Very clever!
• tablespoon 4y ago
  > I wanted wired Ethernet in my office but didn't want to punch holes in the wall. Luckily I have an old "central vacuum system" that as far as I can tell has never been even powered on, many years before I bought the house. Lucky you, you had a preinstalled system of cabling conduit :) Before I had my basement finished, I installed a bunch of PVC conduit for the network wiring, so it would be possible to upgrade or add to it in the future.
  • a9h74j 4y ago
    Same intent here. I don't know what cable I will eventually upgrade to, but the first step will be easily-snakable conduit to every room.
• AussieWog93 4y ago
  Our Ethernet cables go out the windows and around the house. Joys of renting!
  • wrycoder 4y ago
    Around here, the cable installers nail the cables around the outside of the cheap houses and just punch holes through the walls to access the interior.
• Forge36 4y ago
  I love how you ran the wire. Equal parts brilliant and rediculous.
  • Lapsa 4y ago
    Reminds me of my dad who connected to ISP through antenna made out of Pringles can. Surely he found a recipe somewhere but everybody was in awe regardless.
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      Those were all the rage in the early 2000s. We siphoned off a coffee shop about 1/4 mile down the street from our apartment with one.
    • neilv 4y ago
      They have a name now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna
• kirrent 4y ago
  My wired ethernet triumph was in my current rental. There's an old under-floor evaporative air-conditioning ducted system which is no longer used. I bought a $40 remote control car with large rubber wheels and a low CoG, strapped a GoPro and a head torch to it so I could stream video to a phone, and tied on a piece of string. The mission was to get from my study to the kitchen which is about 10m all up. It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around. All of this wasn't helped by the terrible latency and needing to move the phone to different places to reduce distance and attenuation through the floor. I got stuck quite a few times but could always use the string to pull back a bit when I got wedged on a rock. Sometimes I just needed to gun it to get over an obstacle. In the end, the car and ethernet cable were cheaper than a good wireless card or POE kit, and I got to give away the car to a kid.
  • chrisweekly 4y ago
    Stories like this make HN what it is. Thanks for sharing! Love it!
  • klenwell 4y ago
    > It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around. My uncle worked for a company that designed and installed commercial ductwork. The joke he liked to tell while they were going in: "Make sure Bruce Willis can get around in there."
    • mxuribe 4y ago
      As a fan of the Die Hard movies, i got this reference immediately! lol :-D
  • turdnagel 4y ago
    Have you ever seen Blue Streak? There's a scene with a remote control car just like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUGjZQtXkr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUGjZQtXkr4
  • 4y ago
• dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Off-topic but since you brought it up, does anybody ever use builtin central vacuum systems? I have several friends who have houses built during the era when these things were popular but none of them ever use the systems.
  • ajmurmann 4y ago
    My house has this. I've only used it when something was wrong with the alternative. I love the idea, but the hose is huge and ours has a minor defect where it turns itself off if you plug the hose in completely. Roomba and then a handheld Dyson for details is much more convenient
  • lreeves 4y ago
    Yeah I definitely do, the hose is stupidly clunky but as someone with allergies the big advantage is there's no pass through of fine particles into the room you're vacuuming.
    • oh_sigh 4y ago
      There are systems these days where the hose retracts up into the vacuum tubing in the wall, so you just pull out however much you need and then let it feed back into the wall when you're done. This is what I have and it's great. I also have a toe kick adapter, so I can use a regular broom and sweep the dust to a little port under a kitchen cabinet and it automatically sucks it up. I don't have allergies, I just never liked the way it smells so dusty after using a vacuum cleaner inside.
  • JadeNB 4y ago
    > Off-topic but since you brought it up, does anybody ever use builtin central vacuum systems? I have several friends who have houses built during the era when these things were popular but none of them ever use the systems. I grew up in a house with one. I haven't lived there since 1998, but, yes, we used it all the time. As my sibling commenter lreeves says (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361950), it's good if you have allergies.
  • 4y ago
• throwaway09223 4y ago
  I once wired up an apartment for ethernet using the old rj11 (telephone) wires. The phones were all run with cat5e so it was very easy. If you're only doing 100bt you only need two pairs for full duplex, leaving two other pairs to run two phone lines. There are a lot of homes built using cat5 for the phone systems with 2-3 unused pairs in each cable. All I did was swap out the faceplates for rj11/rj45 combo plates and rewire. Of course these days you might just give up the land line entirely to get gigE over all 4 pair and just remove the old rj11 jacks.
  • toast0 4y ago
    > If you're only doing 100bt you only need two pairs for full full duplex, leaving two other pairs to run two phone lines. 10base-T and 100base-Tx both use two pair even for half duplex.
    • 300bps 4y ago
      Cat5 has four pair.
      • e12e 4y ago
        Yeah, 1 pair for signal, one for shielding. Cat3 and Cat5/5e/6 aren't the same - but I think you can practically get up to 1gbps over Cat3 - 10gbps is unlikely.
        • throwaway09223 4y ago
          The "shielding" is done by measuring the difference in signal between two wires in a pair -- that's why twisted pairs are used. There isn't a dedicated pair for this purpose. You need only one pair to run half duplex 10/100bt (contrary to what's stated above), and two pair to run full duplex 10/100bt. In FD, there's one pair each for tx/rx. 10/100bt are very similar in this regard. The different cable categories mostly relate to the wire quality and the number of twists in each pair. gigE is very different and uses all 4 pairs.
• zw123456 4y ago
  for those who do not have old pipes to use, most of us have coax, there is something called MOCA, simply go onto amazon or whatever and search. it allows you to run your ethernet over the cable tv coax in your house "over the top" of any cable tv you have runnning on it. cable uses the first 800Mhz of spectrum on the coax, moca rides above 1ghz so they can coexist. You can extend ethernet from any coax outlet to any other coax outlet. not hole punching, not central vacuum or whatever.
  • ranger207 4y ago
    Wow, running Ethernet over coax like it's the 80s again. Nothing new under the sun I guess
    • zw123456 4y ago
      Ya, well, Moca 3 is pretty new BTW, and it's not your mommy's ethernet over coax, you are thinking of old timey ieee802.3 this is full on OFDM modulation over coax, RF'ey stuff like Docis. Fios uses this to get your signal in over your house cabling. I use it to get my mm-wave 5G 2Gbps signal from my antenna on my garage over the same coax my cable TV runs on to my lab in my basement and have a wifi AP for the rest of the place. Ya, sorry, I stream but I still like my cable, shrug :)
    • bregma 4y ago
      Everything but the termination.
      • zw123456 4y ago
        https://www.ieee802.org/3/ethernet_diag.html https://www.ieee802.org/3/ethernet_diag.html very famous diagram !
  • gabereiser 4y ago
    There is also Ethernet over powerline via powerline adapters. I run these in my apartment. From the router you plug a “host” adapter into an outlet, plug in the ethernet cable. Now you have a source. Throughout the rest of the apartment or house you plug-in a receiving adapter (there’s a little sync button to sync it to the host) and plug in an ethernet cable as an output. Plug that into a small switch if you need more connections. Repeat throughout your home. It’s just as cool as MOCA.
• rkagerer 4y ago
  The great thing is you can upgrade the cable in future for newer technologies (eg. over a decade ago I bought used Mellanox equipment cheaper than 10G and ran fiber drops).
• gonzo 4y ago
  Internet as a series of tubes!
• closeparen 4y ago
  If you are thinking about doing this make sure you use plenum-rated cable, otherwise in addition to packets your Ethernet cables will also be an excellent transport for fire.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • conk 4y ago
    I’m under the impression the concern is more about smoke being emitted during a fire which would then filter into a room and obscure escape paths. This is more of an issue in a commercial building where you have lots of people who need to move through potentially narrow escape routes than it is in a home where every major room will have multiple means of egress.
• tzs 4y ago
  The various people who have replied to you with their own cable solutions is interesting. Mine seems downright uncouth by comparison. I just ran mine up near where the wall meets the ceiling. When inside I look down a lot more than I look up so the ugliness of the cable doesn't bother me. Here's part of my Ethernet cable run [1] through the living room. The other cable in that picture is a speaker cable for one of the home theater rear speakers. [1] https://imgur.com/gallery/uZ0VvtM https://imgur.com/gallery/uZ0VvtM
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    They are sharing their stories because they are more clever than the rest of us. I had a cable going diagonally across the wall for ages before the SO put their foot down and demanded something slightly more aesthetically pleasing. Now it follows the trim at least.
    • a9h74j 4y ago
      I've imagined utility in making a crown molding be a c.a. 10cm angled piece with space behind, for just these reasons. Held with screws of course, or otherwise removable and replaceable.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        And if you don't want it to look especially great surface mounted trunking is decent enough and affordable. Actually it is very common here. Small rectangle mounted either to ceiling or floor of the wall.
      • theshrike79 4y ago
        You can find crown molding with room for cables in it off the shelf, at least around here.
  • mananaysiempre 4y ago
    You can also just own it, cables are not inherently ugly. I’m not saying go full on Centre Pompidou, but a couple of dirt-cheap adhesive clips in an appropriate colour can go a long way (though not if your walls are plastered). The setup in 8-Bit Guy[1]’s old studio is a good inspiration. (Sometimes the clips can be a bit too cheap, in which case tearing off the original crappy adhesive and using some of that insanely-strong double-sided 3M tape helps.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww
• muxneo 4y ago
  This is quite interesting idea!
• mro_name 4y ago
  Like the beetle with honey on its antennae, pulling the thinnest first thread. Thanks for sharing!
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I have a fairly modern house (built mid 2000's) but for some reason wasn't built with ethernet; what was there was phone and coax cable lines, going through these yellow PVC tubes embedded in the wall. In theory it would be a matter of tying an ethernet cable to an existing coax cable and pull through, but in practice, eek. I don't believe those lines are continuous, or there may be debris or kinks in it somewhere in the wall. In the end it took an electrician half an hour and an improvised cable pump to get it through.
  • Lightbody 4y ago
    You should double check that they didn't actually run CAT5e and just terminate using RJ11. My old house (built in 2007) did that.
• hamilyon2 4y ago
  Can't you use 220/110v power wiring to also transmit ethernet? Seems a bit simpler than laying new cable.
  • mhandley 4y ago
    Yes, in principle. In practice I found all the TP-Link ethernet-over-power equipment I used to use to me even less reliable than the WiFi I was trying to supplement. It would work fine for a while, then just lose sync, and I'd have to go round unplugging and replugging everything to get it to sync again. In the end I ran cat-6, but it took me a long time to conclude it was worth the effort. Now my only regret is I didn't decide to do it 10 years earlier.
  • Symbiote 4y ago
    Depending on your wiring, the performance can be terrible. I have one of these, advertised as 2000Mb/s but actually doing about 80, and in a small apartment. Every 6 months or so it connects to my neighbour's system without me doing anything.
• SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
  I'm so glad that in my country we build houses with ducts for cables, with two separate duct networks (one for AC power, and one for "telephony"), when it comes time to change technology we just push those spring-tipped cable guides through the ducts and then pull the new wire (or even just use the old outdated wire as a guide to pull the new one). I've installed Ethernet cables and even replaced AC wire (to a wider gouge or more phases) on rentals with no need for any McGyver shenanigans.
  • stratosmacker 4y ago
    What country is this so I can read more and/or move?
    • Ruphin 4y ago
      I think in most (West-) European countries there are strict regulations/requirements that require ducts/pipes for any kind of power line. When my house was built (35 years ago) there were already regulations in place that required separate ducts for each group, separate groups for wet rooms (kitchen, bathroom) with grounding, etc. Overall I found the standards of electrical work in Europe is significantly higher than US counterparts. In modern buildings every outlet and line has mandatory grounding, and GFCI is built into the fuse box on every power line for any building that's less than 30 years old. That really came in handy once when I accidentally hit a power line when drilling through the ceiling. I can't imagine doing any kind of renovation work without GFCI on everything.
      • lproven 4y ago
        100% agreed. I've seen none of the problems all these (presumably N American) commenters are reporting, but our power systems are famously much better in Europe. I'm from England but live in Czechia and apart from different plugs everything works the same. I bought a rice cooker from a Taiwanese woman a couple of years ago and was shocked (fortunately, not literally) to discover that apparently Taiwan runs on American sockets and American (crappy) voltages. Luckily I had an adaptor plug and it seems to cope with 220V mains without releasing the magic smoke.
• Ruphin 4y ago
  I recently did some renovation work and the house had unused telephone (and COAX cable) wiring running to most rooms. Decided they would probably remain unused forever, so I replaced everything with cat6. You can usually use the old cables to pull through the new one. It's a bit of a chore and may require some specialised tooling for certain outlet brands/types, but it's so nice to just have ethernet outlets everywhere.