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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

In this realm, something I’m going to be doing some time soon is running ethernet through to the various rooms of my home, because it lacks this wiring despite being built in the 00s with a fiber connection being part of the original plan.

While I don’t yet have a professional’s opinion, this is likely to be somewhat involved and expensive as it seems that walls will need to be cut open and in one place, floorboards pulled up. It could turn out that some of the existing wiring has conduits that could be used but I’m not betting on it.

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Depending on the why and what you ultimately want, you might find powerline adapters useful, or the flat ribbon ethernet cables that are so small that you can actually fit it easily between the baseboard and carpet. You could probably run that under carpet and padding (to pass doors or jump halls) and straight through walls at specific points and get fairly good access everywhere with much less work.

Powerline is very bad. It generates huge amounts of RF interference and I’m surprised to see it keeps getting recommended here. MoCa is far better as long as coax is available.

It gets recommended because much of the time coax is not available, so the options are use powerline, use wifi, run cabling around walls, or run cabling through walls. The first two are far easier and less costly in time or money than the latter two, but each has downsides depending in your specific situation.

If you not familiar check out powerline network adapters and access points. Not as good as cat6+ but better than WiFi as backhaul, I've been pleasantly surprised with the performance and throughput of the newer standards. You can get up to 2400 Mbps with the recent models.

> It could turn out that some of the existing wiring has conduits that could be used

Unless it is low voltage in the conduit, you don't want to mix 120v with low voltage wiring.

In residential, it's not a huge deal but does come with the risk of data loss along with, to my understanding, an extremely minimal chance of fire due to inducing voltage. The chance of fire increases as the voltage goes up so generally it's only a risk in commercial or industrial.

You don't have to get inspections or follow code to my understanding but the rule of thumb iirc is 8 inches minimum between low-voltage and 120v. So if 120v is in one stud 'bay', you go to the next one.

Tips: get an "installer bit" -- this is a really long, flexible drill bit that lets you cut a hole for the mounting plate, and drill directly from there down into the floor below. In the ideal case, no drywall patching is needed at all. You mount a low-voltage retrofit box/ring in the hole you made and the keystone wall plate attaches to that.

Also, there is typically a small hole on the end of the installer bit, just below the tip, that lets you use it as “fish stick” and poke your pull line through after you drill the hole.

Consider running single mode fibre instead. You can always convert it to Ethernet.

Doesn’t that require powered converter boxes, similar to MoCA? The nice thing about ethernet is being able to plug in anything anywhere in the house without a power brick.

One dream I have is pulling out my baseboards, carving a channel into them, and putting ethernet cables in there.

You might not even need to carve it out: there is often a 3/8-3/4in gap where the drywall stops.

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