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Monday, May 20, 2002
Media Superhighway in the Crawl Space
May 19, 2002
It starts innocently enough. An RF cable runs under a rug and behind a table to bring video to another room. And then the DirecTV/Tivo wants two satellite feeds and a phone line. And the lap top needs a long phone extension. But now I've got CAT5 going on. Something had to be done.
The most logical way to route low voltage cables in my house is through the crawl space. This allows easy access to the base of the walls, and offers plenty of room for mounting cables. But the crawl space is not my favorite place to be.
"Crawl" is perhaps a generous word. I think of crawling as a hands and knees sort of thing. Below my house, were talking about hands, knees, belly, chest, hips, whatever. It's a full contact sport played on a field of hard dirt, fine dust, and entirely too many pieces of gravel.
Since I don't want to spend a lot of time redoing work in the crawl space, I spent time learning about the modern state of low voltage home wiring. There' a whole market for "structured wiring" in houses. And it's not an esoteric concept that you would find in Gates' or Ellison's abodes. This stuff is in your friendly neighborhood Home Depot. The most complete source I've seen on the web is hometech.
I've been working with the QuickPort line from Leviton, allowing me to custom configure faceplates for phone, network and video. I'm using a 110 punchdown block for phones. If the stuff is cheap and easy, why not use the same grade equipment as the phone company?
I will have network ports in several rooms (and the patio) which all run to my office, where the bulk of the networking equipment will live. I have two network drops to the A/V equipment in my living room. All video servers should be networked ...
The video portion is done, and it is good. From any television in the house, I can get to my Tivo or DVD player, or whatever else I add to the video system. And the remote controls work too.
I'm finishing up the CAT5 work in the crawl space tomorrow. I've had the weekend to recover, but I'm still sore in all sorts of funny places. I hope the patron saint of CAT5 guides my staple gun, because I'm not at all interested in "do-overs".