Running Cat6 throughout the new house

[cbsboyer]

Since the basement of the new house is completely open and undeveloped, I thought this would be the perfect time for future proofing. Since I don't intend to move again, I wanted to run some Cat6 network cable to the rec room, what will become my lab/office, the living room, where the WiFi range extender will live, and two other "office" spaces. I already have a box of cable from another project, so aside from keystone jacks and some plates, there's no other costs. I have a 2.5G switch right now and being able to just swap for a 5 or 10 seems pretty attractive since a NAS box features in my near term plans.

The weird thing about the new place is that they ran double runs of Cat5e to a few random spots and never hooked any of it up. Some of it ends where I want hardwired network anyway. I pulled back three sets of runs of it to run my Cat6, and aside from one line that had a couple gnarly kinks it looks pretty good. Kind of feels like a waste of time to pull out the rest, aside from some OCD screaming "NOOO! IT MUST ALL BE THE SAME!"

Am I actually just wasting time pulling out the Cat5e?

 

[dodger]

Save some cat5e in case you want to PoE some LED lights. Can justify to your OCD that the 5e is for lights and the 6 is for data/hdmi over ether.

 

[cbsboyer]

I ended up pulling almost all of the existing cable because as I was teasing it apart there was just way too much spaghetti. Weird chunks just coiled up going nowhere, and stuff that didn't make any sense where it was going. Either the installer was told "Put in x feet of cable and end points" and nobody checked on what they did, or the builder had wildly different ideas of how the space would be used compared to reality. Or both.

On the upside, I have enough material for about a thousand patch cables . Lots of spare coax too. I did leave some complete runs of that in place in case our future AI overlords bring back cable TV like it's 1999.

 

[Trunks0]

Hope you didn't forget to run a pull strings when doing all the runs to make life easier in the future

Also, old cat cables can make for some pretty decent speaker wire . Just make sure you match the same colors for positive and negative on each end when using it for that

 

[cbsboyer]

Hope you didn't forget to run a pull strings when doing all the runs to make life easier in the future

Also, old cat cables can make for some pretty decent speaker wire . Just make sure you match the same colors for positive and negative on each end when using it for that

I thought about it (even have a spool of nylon cord), but without putting it in conduit there's no way I could pull it end to end in one go. There's truss plates sticking up everywhere and I'd just shred the cable (guess how I figured that out). I just ran double of everything in case there's a problem later on.