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> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - i

by tzs 3y ago

> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s. I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them. The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that. I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop. Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch. Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together. Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?

graphe 3y ago
Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  In that's your usecase, it's better to save yourself the hassle and just set up good WiFi
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- toast0 3y ago
  If you get old equipment to go with your old cabling, ethernet is not necessarily switched. 10 and 100 can be run as a shared medium. Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.
  - InvaderFizz 3y ago
    Worth trying on a shorter run of CAT3, yes. Worth trying on a standard untwisted two pair phone line? Nope. Good luck getting even 5meters.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  20Mb/s is enough? Is this a joke? A single youtube full HD stream can reach 7Mb/s. Literallywatching a youtube movie and doing something else will saturate that link. In fact I think it's so low it will negatively impact basic website loading time. Just going to reddit.com loads 18.2 MB of resources. This will take about 8 seconds on your "useable for everything".
  - tharkun__ 3y ago
    My internet connection has 15Mb/s down Thank you very much. So while I'm not your parent I can totally see how that 20 is totally fine. So if you are in a corner of the house you can't get Wifi to that's on par why not use that cable if it exists? Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No. Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basement room? Absolutely. Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.
    - ska 3y ago
      > No patience. Or maybe they want to stream UHD content?
  - graphe 3y ago
    20Mb/s isn't 20mbps.
    - bpye 3y ago
      That’s exactly what it is. 20MB/s isn’t 20mbps, it would be 160mbps.
      - graphe 3y ago
        I always thought Mb/s meant megabytes and mb/S was megabit
    - 3y ago
- Shaanie 3y ago
  20 Mb/s is terrible. Sure, it'll work in some sense, but I'd go mad if that's the best I could get. A good wifi setup is way better than a cabled 20 Mb/s unless you absolutely need consist and better latency for some reason.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    Doesn't a modern Wi-fi still has worse ping than CAT4 cable?
  - graphe 3y ago
    He said hard to reach places. If an old house has CAT4 in the basement, I'll take the lower pings, reliability, and at worst I'll WebDAV. Unless your home server is in the basement I can't see a normal realistic scenario where the data transfer isn't sufficient.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  My 4k blu ray rips range between 60 and 100 GB. These would not even be close watchable over 20mb/s. Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. I don't transfer 60gb blurays daily so it doesn't matter to me.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      1. It's not enough when you're on an active connection doing other things at the same time as the video. Live streams at full quality will use a third to half of 20Mbps and demand very little interruption. Loading a single page with a few images can interfere. And even dedicated 20Mbps, with tightly encoded content, can be too little for 4k. 2. The idea in the comment is streaming at original bluray quality. Not transferring.
    - charlie0 3y ago
      Maybe 720P, but I've got 4k Blu ray movies that have peaks of over 200Mb/s when streaming and my device always stutters over those sections.
    - babypuncher 3y ago
      20mb/s is not sufficient for 4k video unless it has been bitcrushed to death. And even then, you are assuming a given network only has a single user. Also, I stream actual blu-ray rips over my network all the time, not just transferring them.
    - acuozzo 3y ago
      > Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. On a 120" display?
    - rfoo 3y ago
      This feels exactly like "I don't have ethernet cards capable of 100Mbps so scp can't copy files faster than 10Mbps is not OpenSSH's problem".
noir_lord 3y ago
Can't tell if serious or not so bravo. On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Same. I spent a good amount of time in our house the first fall setting up PoE cameras, which involved much time crawling around the attic. Hell of a workout and can be unpleasant but extremely doable.
  - noir_lord 3y ago
    Mask, Gloves and a Long Sleeved shirt and it's all good. Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.
    - saalweachter 3y ago
      I've always wondered if that's the old glass insulation itself, or the accumulated mouse-poop-dust embedding itself in the microscratches and freaking out your immune system.
      - Baeocystin 3y ago
        From the one time I blew in insulation without wearing a full Tyvek suit, I am confident is answering that it's the glass. That was an itchy lesson. (I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mouse poop factor along for the ride after long enough, though)
        lazide 3y ago
fragmede 3y ago
it's not that hard to only step on the joists in the attic, if it was built to code. if you don't want to crawl in the crawlspace, pay someone else to do it for you.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
My most interesting ethernet run: My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work. SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there. It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.
bombcar 3y ago
You can hire someone to run the cable for you, it's not a terribly hard job. The most expensive part is getting out there. So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable. Drones is overthinking it.
- tzs 3y ago
  > So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free. I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge. A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof. The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them. So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.
  - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
    Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting. They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.
burntalmonds 3y ago
Lay some sheets of plywood down in the attic. Then you'll be able to move around easily. Up there you have direct access to the walls of your rooms so you can drill a hole and drop ethernet cable down behind the wall.
- hamburglar 3y ago
  And on the plywood, go buy a 4x8 foot sheet and cut it into 4 4x2 foot sheets. These are easy to carry into your attic one or two at a time and you can lay them down as “tiles” that span 4 16in joists. Easy to just lay them down (screwed to the joists) to where you need to get and also continue extending your tiles later if you want to either get further or complete your “floor” for storage purposes. And you can still take up one tile at a time if you need to get access to something like the top side of a ceiling light fixture.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    If you ask nicely and go at a not-busy time, larger home improvement stores will generally cut them for you there.
    - hamburglar 3y ago
      Many also just offer this as a service for like $.50 or $1 per cut. Very worth it if you don’t have a vehicle that can transport a full sheet.
projektfu 3y ago
Crawlspace is better. You just make your access and then you can drill down with a flexible bit. Pass the cable down, some twine on the other side, then you only have one quick crawl to pull the cable and maybe put up some cable staples to keep it out of the way. In the attic you have to fish the cable all the way down, makes it harder.
antonjs 3y ago
Fish tape and a cheap endoscope are the tools you want.
myself248 3y ago
Your details are crazy, especially the drone, but the overall concept is feasible. I did this professionally for years. Wheeled or tracked R/C cars are much easier to control, and can pull a greater force horizontally without losing control. In the 90s it was somewhat standard, especially in office environments with drop ceilings, to use a little 9.6v Tyco Fast Traxx to zip a pullstring across the ceiling grid, then use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.) Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge. Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame. In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable. (Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)
- chadcatlett 3y ago
  RC vehicles, balls with an eye bolt & string w/ a sling shot, and fish tape/poles were key things for the miles and miles of network cable I ran in a previous life. To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.
- aksss 3y ago
  > flopped along the ceiling grid wasn’t professional In a commercial setting at least, it’s not up to code, let alone standards of good workmanship.
sonicanatidae 3y ago
This splice is the only issue, really.
wannacboatmovie 3y ago
Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic". Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Finding a competent electrician these days, for a residential job, can be the difficult part.
  - Baeocystin 3y ago
    I work with several low-voltage guys on different jobs, both new development and retrofit. It is exceedingly difficult to find good cable guys. Running parallel to romex, staples through the middle of the cable, minimum radius as a non-existent concept... Like you say, the competency is the hard part to find. And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Almost all homeowners can't pay more than commercial jobs (for the same amount of billable work). Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs. Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)
      - lazide 3y ago
        Post COVID burnout (or maybe it’s cognitive dissonance issues?) seems to be a thing too. Just finding a contractor or business owner able to think clearly is reaching near impossibility. Like on even the most basic things. It’s quite concerning.
js2 3y ago
> That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s. I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential. Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s). If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology. That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home: https://superuser.com/a/1281656 https://superuser.com/a/1281656
- xen2xen1 3y ago
  I thought gigabit required all four pairs, or am I missing part of what you said?
  - anamexis 3y ago
    They said exactly that.
  - kvmet 3y ago
    For typical Ethernet sure. Although there are newer standards that can use a single pair (1000Base-T1). They are very range-limited though and not what you would normally install in your house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T1
signatureMove 3y ago
IMO sounds crazy. Can't you just step on the wooden frame instead of the space between them?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Lots of people just lay some planks down over the joists.
- lazide 3y ago
  Sure, but don’t slip/screw up, or you’re going to have a very bad time (and a lot of expensive fixes to make). If you’re up there a lot or doing a lot of things, it’s also exhausting paying that much attention. And inevitably, you’ll screw up.
inglor_cz 3y ago
Reading you both... I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.
- bobbob1921 3y ago
  Definitely a great move and idea. One thing people frequently overlook when buying higher end CAT x copper cable is the thicker the cable the more difficult (some cases impossible) to attach an RJ45 head/plug or Keystone type connector. Additionally, it can become much more difficult to flex/bend, especially if considering it in an electrical gang box for a face plate. This is why frequently you’ll see “cat 8” bulk cable for not much more than cat 6E bulk cable.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  [dead]
gosub100 3y ago
Are the two rooms on the same breaker/fuse (by some chance)? Another solution is ethernet-over-powerline where the data rides on your AC powerlines and is decoded at each end by an adapter. Supposedly they can get to the mid-hundreds of mbps, but only if they're on the same breaker. I used one in a rube-goldberg (Neighbor's WiFi)->(My Raspberry Pi, NAT Router)->(Ethernet-over-powerline)->(My WiFi Router) about 8 years ago, but the EoP was only good for a couple mbps because the signal had to go through the breaker. It was fine for poor-man's internet though.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  You can get about 500Mbps at best, which is honestly fine for most uses. That being said, I removed my EOP after I ungraded to Eero 6e's. The wireless backhaul was much faster than the wired at that point, and Eeros won't load balance between the two interfaces, so the hardwire was actually slowing things down. Sure is handy when you need a cable and same-breaker sockets are nearby, though!
bombela 3y ago
Just bite the bullet and crawl under the house or in the attic. I have done it many times it's not the end of the world. The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location. I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.
Baeocystin 3y ago
>Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to. I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms. Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.
saalweachter 3y ago
If you're ever in the situation where you have your walls open and you want to install data cables, do yourself a favor and go nuts with some Smurf tubes. (ENT boxes and tubes.) Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need. Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 3y ago
Seems easier to just go into the attic and not step on the drywall.
medstrom 3y ago
Maybe you can have a friend stick his head into the attic at the destination, while you stick your head up at the origin, then you just tie the cable end to a basketball and throw it through the attic for your friend to catch.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  We use tennis balls and string all the time; works great. (We just tape the string to the balls with a few loops of duct tape, though.)
beAbU 3y ago
One day of dirty, sweaty work in the crawlspace, compared to possibly years of not staring at ugly cables nailed to the walls... But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)
stevehawk 3y ago
the amount of effort that your will to put into this to not enter your attic is absolutely astounding. by the time you finished formulating even a basic plane to fly a drone to run a cable and displace all of your blown in insulation you could have simply run the cable.

by tzs 3y ago

graphe 3y ago

Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.

pzmarzly 3y ago
In that's your usecase, it's better to save yourself the hassle and just set up good WiFi
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
toast0 3y ago
If you get old equipment to go with your old cabling, ethernet is not necessarily switched. 10 and 100 can be run as a shared medium. Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.
- InvaderFizz 3y ago
  Worth trying on a shorter run of CAT3, yes. Worth trying on a standard untwisted two pair phone line? Nope. Good luck getting even 5meters.
rowanG077 3y ago
20Mb/s is enough? Is this a joke? A single youtube full HD stream can reach 7Mb/s. Literallywatching a youtube movie and doing something else will saturate that link. In fact I think it's so low it will negatively impact basic website loading time. Just going to reddit.com loads 18.2 MB of resources. This will take about 8 seconds on your "useable for everything".
- tharkun__ 3y ago
  My internet connection has 15Mb/s down Thank you very much. So while I'm not your parent I can totally see how that 20 is totally fine. So if you are in a corner of the house you can't get Wifi to that's on par why not use that cable if it exists? Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No. Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basement room? Absolutely. Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.
  - ska 3y ago
    > No patience. Or maybe they want to stream UHD content?
- graphe 3y ago
  20Mb/s isn't 20mbps.
  - bpye 3y ago
    That’s exactly what it is. 20MB/s isn’t 20mbps, it would be 160mbps.
    - graphe 3y ago
      I always thought Mb/s meant megabytes and mb/S was megabit
  - 3y ago
Shaanie 3y ago
20 Mb/s is terrible. Sure, it'll work in some sense, but I'd go mad if that's the best I could get. A good wifi setup is way better than a cabled 20 Mb/s unless you absolutely need consist and better latency for some reason.
- eimrine 3y ago
  Doesn't a modern Wi-fi still has worse ping than CAT4 cable?
- graphe 3y ago
  He said hard to reach places. If an old house has CAT4 in the basement, I'll take the lower pings, reliability, and at worst I'll WebDAV. Unless your home server is in the basement I can't see a normal realistic scenario where the data transfer isn't sufficient.
babypuncher 3y ago
My 4k blu ray rips range between 60 and 100 GB. These would not even be close watchable over 20mb/s. Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.
- graphe 3y ago
  Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. I don't transfer 60gb blurays daily so it doesn't matter to me.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    1. It's not enough when you're on an active connection doing other things at the same time as the video. Live streams at full quality will use a third to half of 20Mbps and demand very little interruption. Loading a single page with a few images can interfere. And even dedicated 20Mbps, with tightly encoded content, can be too little for 4k. 2. The idea in the comment is streaming at original bluray quality. Not transferring.
  - charlie0 3y ago
    Maybe 720P, but I've got 4k Blu ray movies that have peaks of over 200Mb/s when streaming and my device always stutters over those sections.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    20mb/s is not sufficient for 4k video unless it has been bitcrushed to death. And even then, you are assuming a given network only has a single user. Also, I stream actual blu-ray rips over my network all the time, not just transferring them.
  - acuozzo 3y ago
    > Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. On a 120" display?
  - rfoo 3y ago
    This feels exactly like "I don't have ethernet cards capable of 100Mbps so scp can't copy files faster than 10Mbps is not OpenSSH's problem".

noir_lord 3y ago

Can't tell if serious or not so bravo. On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Same. I spent a good amount of time in our house the first fall setting up PoE cameras, which involved much time crawling around the attic. Hell of a workout and can be unpleasant but extremely doable.
- noir_lord 3y ago
  Mask, Gloves and a Long Sleeved shirt and it's all good. Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    I've always wondered if that's the old glass insulation itself, or the accumulated mouse-poop-dust embedding itself in the microscratches and freaking out your immune system.
    - Baeocystin 3y ago
      From the one time I blew in insulation without wearing a full Tyvek suit, I am confident is answering that it's the glass. That was an itchy lesson. (I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mouse poop factor along for the ride after long enough, though)
      - lazide 3y ago

fragmede 3y ago

it's not that hard to only step on the joists in the attic, if it was built to code. if you don't want to crawl in the crawlspace, pay someone else to do it for you.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

My most interesting ethernet run: My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work. SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there. It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.

bombcar 3y ago

You can hire someone to run the cable for you, it's not a terribly hard job. The most expensive part is getting out there. So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable. Drones is overthinking it.

tzs 3y ago
> So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free. I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge. A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof. The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them. So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting. They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.

burntalmonds 3y ago

Lay some sheets of plywood down in the attic. Then you'll be able to move around easily. Up there you have direct access to the walls of your rooms so you can drill a hole and drop ethernet cable down behind the wall.

hamburglar 3y ago
And on the plywood, go buy a 4x8 foot sheet and cut it into 4 4x2 foot sheets. These are easy to carry into your attic one or two at a time and you can lay them down as “tiles” that span 4 16in joists. Easy to just lay them down (screwed to the joists) to where you need to get and also continue extending your tiles later if you want to either get further or complete your “floor” for storage purposes. And you can still take up one tile at a time if you need to get access to something like the top side of a ceiling light fixture.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  If you ask nicely and go at a not-busy time, larger home improvement stores will generally cut them for you there.
  - hamburglar 3y ago
    Many also just offer this as a service for like $.50 or $1 per cut. Very worth it if you don’t have a vehicle that can transport a full sheet.

projektfu 3y ago

Crawlspace is better. You just make your access and then you can drill down with a flexible bit. Pass the cable down, some twine on the other side, then you only have one quick crawl to pull the cable and maybe put up some cable staples to keep it out of the way. In the attic you have to fish the cable all the way down, makes it harder.

antonjs 3y ago

Fish tape and a cheap endoscope are the tools you want.

myself248 3y ago

Your details are crazy, especially the drone, but the overall concept is feasible. I did this professionally for years. Wheeled or tracked R/C cars are much easier to control, and can pull a greater force horizontally without losing control. In the 90s it was somewhat standard, especially in office environments with drop ceilings, to use a little 9.6v Tyco Fast Traxx to zip a pullstring across the ceiling grid, then use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.) Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge. Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame. In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable. (Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)

chadcatlett 3y ago
RC vehicles, balls with an eye bolt & string w/ a sling shot, and fish tape/poles were key things for the miles and miles of network cable I ran in a previous life. To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.
aksss 3y ago
> flopped along the ceiling grid wasn’t professional In a commercial setting at least, it’s not up to code, let alone standards of good workmanship.

sonicanatidae 3y ago

This splice is the only issue, really.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago

Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic". Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."

ethbr1 3y ago
Finding a competent electrician these days, for a residential job, can be the difficult part.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  I work with several low-voltage guys on different jobs, both new development and retrofit. It is exceedingly difficult to find good cable guys. Running parallel to romex, staples through the middle of the cable, minimum radius as a non-existent concept... Like you say, the competency is the hard part to find. And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Almost all homeowners can't pay more than commercial jobs (for the same amount of billable work). Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs. Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)
    - lazide 3y ago
      Post COVID burnout (or maybe it’s cognitive dissonance issues?) seems to be a thing too. Just finding a contractor or business owner able to think clearly is reaching near impossibility. Like on even the most basic things. It’s quite concerning.

js2 3y ago

> That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s. I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential. Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s). If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology. That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home: https://superuser.com/a/1281656 https://superuser.com/a/1281656

xen2xen1 3y ago
I thought gigabit required all four pairs, or am I missing part of what you said?
- anamexis 3y ago
  They said exactly that.
- kvmet 3y ago
  For typical Ethernet sure. Although there are newer standards that can use a single pair (1000Base-T1). They are very range-limited though and not what you would normally install in your house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T1

signatureMove 3y ago

IMO sounds crazy. Can't you just step on the wooden frame instead of the space between them?

WalterBright 3y ago
Lots of people just lay some planks down over the joists.
lazide 3y ago
Sure, but don’t slip/screw up, or you’re going to have a very bad time (and a lot of expensive fixes to make). If you’re up there a lot or doing a lot of things, it’s also exhausting paying that much attention. And inevitably, you’ll screw up.

inglor_cz 3y ago

Reading you both... I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.

bobbob1921 3y ago
Definitely a great move and idea. One thing people frequently overlook when buying higher end CAT x copper cable is the thicker the cable the more difficult (some cases impossible) to attach an RJ45 head/plug or Keystone type connector. Additionally, it can become much more difficult to flex/bend, especially if considering it in an electrical gang box for a face plate. This is why frequently you’ll see “cat 8” bulk cable for not much more than cat 6E bulk cable.
AniseAbyss 3y ago
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gosub100 3y ago

Are the two rooms on the same breaker/fuse (by some chance)? Another solution is ethernet-over-powerline where the data rides on your AC powerlines and is decoded at each end by an adapter. Supposedly they can get to the mid-hundreds of mbps, but only if they're on the same breaker. I used one in a rube-goldberg (Neighbor's WiFi)->(My Raspberry Pi, NAT Router)->(Ethernet-over-powerline)->(My WiFi Router) about 8 years ago, but the EoP was only good for a couple mbps because the signal had to go through the breaker. It was fine for poor-man's internet though.

Baeocystin 3y ago
You can get about 500Mbps at best, which is honestly fine for most uses. That being said, I removed my EOP after I ungraded to Eero 6e's. The wireless backhaul was much faster than the wired at that point, and Eeros won't load balance between the two interfaces, so the hardwire was actually slowing things down. Sure is handy when you need a cable and same-breaker sockets are nearby, though!

bombela 3y ago

Just bite the bullet and crawl under the house or in the attic. I have done it many times it's not the end of the world. The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location. I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.

Baeocystin 3y ago

>Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to. I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms. Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.

saalweachter 3y ago

If you're ever in the situation where you have your walls open and you want to install data cables, do yourself a favor and go nuts with some Smurf tubes. (ENT boxes and tubes.) Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need. Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.

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rayiner 3y ago

Seems easier to just go into the attic and not step on the drywall.

medstrom 3y ago

Maybe you can have a friend stick his head into the attic at the destination, while you stick your head up at the origin, then you just tie the cable end to a basketball and throw it through the attic for your friend to catch.

Baeocystin 3y ago
We use tennis balls and string all the time; works great. (We just tape the string to the balls with a few loops of duct tape, though.)

beAbU 3y ago

One day of dirty, sweaty work in the crawlspace, compared to possibly years of not staring at ugly cables nailed to the walls... But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)

stevehawk 3y ago

the amount of effort that your will to put into this to not enter your attic is absolutely astounding. by the time you finished formulating even a basic plane to fly a drone to run a cable and displace all of your blown in insulation you could have simply run the cable.