Hello fellow ozbargainer's.
I was wondering what type of "damage" I should expect to have a professional wire my house for cat 6.
Because of the layout of my house (some parts of the house are extremely old), an my lack of handyman skills I am looking for some advice/recommendations.
How much should I expect to pay?
What should I know prior to undertaking the investment?
Any recommendations for installer's?, I am based in Melbourne (I am in no rush, as I fully expect to have to wait until after Covid restrictions die down)
Any other advice/recommendations are greatly appreciated.
Kind regards
Advice on getting my house wired with cat 6
steve9999 on 03/10/2020 - 13:31
Comments
But keep in mind that a good set of powerline adaptors with pass-through (so you can continue to use the power point for power) will cost a bit too.
Networking is a clean solution too.
As example, kicking myself because I missed installing a network port in one room because wife kicked up a stick at the extra $100 (during planning stage for build). I've since spent $250 on two solutions (powerline and then better wifi gear) to get internet to that room.
Yeah absolutely, investing in infrastructure at the development stage is definitely the way to go in terms of efficient usage of funds (not to get political but, if only the gov't would learn this … looking at you NBN).
I actually invested in a powerline adapter at one point, was super infuriating to use (keep in mind that I bought a cheap one), for example when someone would use the microwave interruptions in the network would occur.
However, I think it depends on your house setup maybe my power circuits have too much interference or something.
Glad to hear that it is working out for you though.Was in the same dilemma, was using freebie netgear adapters by foxtel, constant dropouts… Eventually was going to fork out a fair bit on some formal cabling by a licensed sparky, then happen to come across an ad for tplink's top of the range av2000 units (big brother, I know), $130 I recall online, works a charm, 3 months running.
I've spent about $600 on 3 different powerline adaptors over several years that just never worked consistently. Though that speaks more to the quality of the wiring where I live.
House on stumps/piers or concrete pad?
To be honest I am not 100% sure. But since just looking up what piers mean, I can only assume that my house is on concrete pads.
It's stumps/piers or 'slab' not 'pads' — pads are actually the concrete footings used under engineered piers. The concrete slab would be the issue, since you cannot add easily wiring through it after construction, unless you are okay with removing flooring to cut channels into the slab.
Depends on access, etc. Best to get someone to quote.
For comparison - I recently paid approx $350 to move my HFC point + install three Ethernet points (to two locations).
Ideally you want to use a certified cabler - whirlpool has a list of cablers in their knowledge-base.
Cheers, do you reckon you could drop me a link? I couldn't seem to find it.
Cheers mate.
Typically it is about $200-$300 a point.
To reduce cost consider cabling wifi APs in a couple key locations back to your main router. For example, I did my study and TV lounge back back to the router (so that the main PC and various set top boxes would have wired connections). However I only did one point to each location and attached a WAP which had ethernet switch in it.
The advantage of wired is just it just works for years and years where as doing tricky things like wifi mesh or repeaters or power line ethernet can stop working, need a reboot etc.
Labour will be the big cost and electricians will charge approx. $100 per hour. It depends on the length of the cable run and what sort of roof/ under the house access you have to know how quickly they could do it.
Unless you know someone willing to make it a cashy I'd look at wireless options.At the moment we have a decent wirless setup, as in most of the house is covered an the speeds are decent but the ping would still be better if it was wired.
In the future I am also looking at setting up a Nas, so I figure either way the infrastructure will be used.
I'm sure with the near completion of the nbn, you'd be able to find cablers on the cheap. try airtasker and make sure they have ACMA licence.
You should expect a rounded rectangular hole cut on the wall's you ask for them to be installed and a RJ45 socket plate covering it. There might be some scratching to the back of the dry wall by the plate's mounting mechanism. You might loose a little in wall insulation and you might have a few nails driven into studs in your roof (depends on accessibility to your roof and if the install fells like they need to do a clean job (which will cost you more). There will be a small amount of dust added to the room from the part of the wall removed. You might be given a few small cuts of tiny coloured cable if you have carpet below the hole. A good installer will usually clean most of it up.
If conduit is needed because the wall is brick, you might loose some paint (if painted) or material if you take it off later. Some morons will use screws to install conduit, so you might also luck out with screw holes (Yay).
If you are unlucky or cheap out you might get a foot though your ceiling.
I am sure there is other damage you might experience.
This Guy is taking the question literally!
This Guy knows whats up.
expect installers to up the fee for the older parts of the house as it probably contains asbestos and requires full safety stuff
Negligible at best and won't do squat.
If you've got access to the walls from in the roof cavity you really only need a drill with a long shank attachment to a spade bit, this is to drill through the center stud in the frame if it's timber and just a normal spade bit for the top plate of the wall. You can use either a draw string with a little weight on it or a bit of conduit to sleeve around the cat 6 as you push it down through the center stud hole and pull it out after the cable is in. Keep in my you have to feed it through the rest of your cable if you do that otherwise you can do that to run a chase cable also. If you've got multiple just remember you'll have them all leading back to one central location and if it's more than 6 you won't fit them all on the gang plate. Now you could go get a decent punch down tool and terminate them all yourself or you could just get the cables run and then get someone in to terminate them all, sparky or aerial person. I did this all on my previous house and it was pretty straight forward to do and on our new house I ran it all through the build, 25 points in total, I decided I would rather spend the money whilst building on some cheap cable over having to go in the ceiling again. Hope these gives you some food for thought. Cheers
My first power line adapters (Netgear I think) I found in a garage sale, $1 each. So good I bought another pair retail for the other house. Once you’ve got the pairing done they run for years without an issue.
I ran with EoP adapters for about 5 years, but got someone in to wire up my house with Cat6 this year. While EoP "worked", I had a relatively old adapter - it was AV500, but that's the max rate with ideal wiring, and it appeared to cap out below 100Mb/s at my place based on local file transfer speeds. I could have upgraded with another set of EoP adapters, but with my partner also working more from home (and further sharing the EoP bandwidth), I felt it was better to do it "properly" with Cat6.
If you're getting someone to pull cable, consider running two ports to each point.
Minimal extra labour cost to pull a second cable at the same time and terminate, but the cost of the extra copper will be cheaper than getting someone to do it all again if needed.
With everything being connected these days it's not unusual to need that extra port.
Not limited to LAN either, you can get baluns for pretty much anything you might need if you want to use the CAT6 for other purposes.
Another thing you might want to do even if just for future proofing is running a CAT6 to somewhere central in your house, left in the ceiling, in case you want to install a ceiling mounted WAP (Unifi etc)
I was lucky I had tv ports (coaxial cable) in most Rooms. I just tied a rope to the coaxial cable, pulled it into the roof void, then tied the cat 6 to it and pulled both back down. Even better run a second rope and leave it in the wall incase you ever want to run another cable, like a second network port - I do this behind my wall mounted tv incase I need another hdmi later too.
Also since this is OzBargain- instead of paying a sparky, ring a security company and see if one of their camera installers is willing to do a cashy, should be a lot cheaper and they are still licensed cablers.
I have been wanting this for years. Got quoted $600 for 3 points. I stopped looking at that point. Is powerline adapter a good option? I have been using it and works great for Fetch TV.