I think it’s time to re-wire the house | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s time to re-wire the house

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46 pointsedward39 comments

Sounds like a paradise. Having a stable house that you can undertake these makery projects. For me, I'm still trying to find a country that I can even settle :))

This was me years ago. Now I have the house but still don't do any of these things. It feels like why do I want a bunch of stuff that I'll just have to get rid of someday once my kids grow up and I can be a nomad again.

Physically I've been settled for almost a decade now and locked in for another decade plus, but mentally I don't think I ever changed and this just feels like a longish stopover.

How interesting!! Thanks for sharing this. Let me get back to you in 20 years on how settling went for me.

Yours sincerely, Nomad

As a studio apartment dweller, it seems downright foreign to me to even have a space for where to stick a rack.

I guess calling what I have a studio is a stretch, I think they really do that to have it meet fire code. Regardless, I've managed this (although I don't have anything loud and maybe that's what you're talking about.) Personally I put the rack in the middle of the room and use it to partition sleeping space from workshop space.

IMO the advantage to having everything as a single room is that you can define what space is used for what much more precisely this way (which is pretty great when you're working from home.)

Yeah, I personally love the one big room layout but it makes some things harder. I'd like to put all of my noisier stuff in the corridor, as it's the furthest point away from the alcove where my bed is, but there's a lack of network and electricity connectivity there.

My four-bay NAS is currently in my media cabinet that's not too far from my bed and sometimes the vibrations of the disks annoy me as I'm trying to fall asleep.

i used to get a resonant rumble from the TV stand the NAS was in/on when the disks were spinning (only 2) - I can't remember what i did at the time but I managed to isolate the NAS to reduce that noise.

Same. Maybe later in life, I will have resources and time for all the hacks I have in mind.

Go for it. Don’t postpone what you could achieve now. You don’t know what will come later in your life.

I always wanted solar. But I live in an apartment. I found some solutions, and now sell simplified versions of them.

Go for it - great advice IMO

A snide comment like this isn’t very nice. I don’t get why people think this is the appropriate place to complain about this Twitter user’s privilege...

It doesn’t seem like a complaint to me. Just a reflection over different situations.

A non-profit org I'm involved with expanded their facility and I got to plan and install a bunch of stuff before they closed up the walls.

* Rack in a specially built wall recess.

* PoE switch.

* Cat 6 everywhere for network and IP phones.

* Empty conduit for future expansion.

* PoE mesh APs.

* Ethernet for internal and external IP cameras.

* HDMI from podium to TV and projector locations.

* Giant powered projection screen.

* Raspberry Pi powered dashboard displays throughout.

That was something I don't get to do every day and a lot of fun.

Why would you put Cat6 when Cat7 is priced almost the same. Future proofing.

where i live, cat6a is double price of cat6. cat7 price is even higher.

I really like his workshop. Tools are well organized. No dirt. Enough space for working.

That’s one of my life goals.

I appreciate his attitude towards the support people he's working with. Too many customers see it as their right/responsibility to make support people's lives miserable because of someone else's screwup or because their employer sucks.

We should bring back crown molding and big chunky baseboards. There’s a lot of cool wiring tricks you can do if you have an inch at the top of the wall and a couple at the base, without necessarily removing the drywall to do it.

Was a company years ago that did hollow molding and triangular mounting brackets that gave a bunch of space to run wiring. I wonder if they’re still around.

I'm not sure if there are any hollow moldings still around. The closest equivalent I'm aware of is Legrand's Wiremold[0] line, which includes cable raceways that are functionally equivalent to hollow moldings. However, these parts are designed for the commercial electrical market and would be difficult to fit into residential decor.

[0] https://www.legrand.us/wire-and-cable-management/raceway-and...

I'll admit it's been a few years, but every time I've looked at molding, it's either carved out of 1x6 stock or pressed out of some fiber material and shaped as if it were.

There is a small triangular void that you fill with a triangular piece of wood [backing strips, that's the phrase I was looking for] or some wedges at intervals in order to support it.

In this age where rare earth magnets are getting cheap, it'd be cool to have wood or coated MDF trim that's secured with magnets and little ferrous iron inserts. Then you just need a stronger magnet (like those passive stud finders) to pop the whole thing off and run more wires.

Of course the next problem is you have a narrow, concealed raceway full of plastic insulation, which is something that rodents like to chew on...

If I try to look for crown molding, I'm seeing a lot of accent light solutions built into plastic molding (you leave a gap for the light to come out from behind the molding). It's... okay. I'd rather have 10g ethernet in my house though.

Is PoE to everything a common layout? I didn't realize it could support anywhere near that much power.

PoE is dark magic to me. How can you send any amperage at all through those hair thick leads?!

It’s ok, the cable will act as a fuse when necessary.

Aircraft fuses exist not to save the several hundred-thousand dollar avionics install, but specifically to protect the wire from melting, shorting, or starting fires where fire does not belong [1] (page 11-15, para. 11-51).

This is relevant because fire also does not belong inside the walls of your home. I assume you're just having a laugh, but just in case others take you too seriously: wire is not a substitute for a fuse.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

Correct on all points, sir or maam.

Hey, hey, we're not talking about USB-PD here. :-) PoE actually works.

They split the amperage across multiple wires. I think PoE is always DC so the runs can’t be as long as with AC.

Actually why can’t you run PoE as AC? Embedding a high frequency signal on a lower frequency carrier is older than dirt at this point.

At 120 volts, 30 watts is only a quarter amp.

Cable run length doesn't really have anything to do with DC vs. AC, it's all about the voltage. Power losses are proportional to current squared, so for a given power transmitted, they're proportional to the inverse square of the voltage.

We're just used to power transmission being AC because with AC it's easier to switch large currents on and off, and easier to step voltage up/down.

The insulation for CAT5 and RJ45 is rated for 125V. You don't want to be that close to the rating for a cable that can be moved/bent/stretched (for comparison, an AC cable is rated at least 300V). And the RJ45 connectors are not designed for that kind of dangerous voltage.

> And the RJ45 connectors are not designed for that kind of dangerous voltage.

Right, there will be a voltage where the pins will arc, and a lower potential where a dirty connector will arc.

We rented an office that had previously housed some sort of telecom equipment, so the whole place was wired for, I believe it's 40 volts rackmount equipment. That runs at lower current (thus watts) than computers and so we had to run new electrical and AC into the server room to use it for IT equipment.

Cars are trying to switch to 48V because 40-50V is a range where touching a live wire gets your attention but won't do too much permanent damage (eg kill you). Or if you went with 20v you might be able to reuse equipment designed for USB power supplies.

Jesus, IEEE 802.3bt can do up to 100 watts PoE now?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet

CAT5e and especially cat6/cat7 is not usually hair thick, it's usually 24 AWG (and in better cables 23 or even 22). The ampacity of 24AWG is around 3A (more if you accept a bit of heat). PoE is limited to less than 1A per pair, but it makes the power through voltage (usually between 48 and 57 volts), and by using more than one pair.

PoE runs at 48V, which means even if you're running only half an amp per pair you'll end up with about 24x4=96W of capacity (the standard actually allows for 600 mA per pair).

I'm going off memory but you can run ~2amps over 22g. But voltage drop starts being a problem at low voltage. I think Ethernet cables are 24-26g.

Pretty much. I have a small flat compared to US standards, but there's plenty of Ethernet wiring and I have a small (passively cooled) 16-port Linksys PoE switch so I can run 2 wifi APs and 4 security cameras through PoE, which is nice because I don't need the 230V power or the bulky power adapters.

Yeah, agreed. If I'm reading it right and they're putting the TV on PoE too, they're way out of the power budget which is only 30 watts per port.

And I say this as someone who's currently going nuts with PoE going to home automation (speakers, cameras, soil monitor sensors, sprinkler relays, etc).

Clarification there: I have a US-8 behind each TV, taking 802.11af loads to power. For the TV with an AP or something else PoE behind it, those switches can take in 802.11at and output 802.11af on port 8. The TVs themselves aren’t PoE...I’m crazy, just not that crazy :)

Lol, word, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the clarification! : )

IEEE 802.3bt is supposed to be good for 50-90W.

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