Adventures in home networking, part 1

When we last left off, my wife's Mac was in the cold basement not on the internet, and my PC is upstairs in a nice warm carpeted room. I'm starting to get the hint when every time I go to get on my machine, someone is sitting at it already. I have a wireless router and I could easily put an AirPort card into the G4 tower, but it just pains me to do that when the machine already has built-in GigE. I decide that I will move the cable modem and wired router into the basement, and run cabling up to my PC on the second floor. This will be one small step in reducing the mess in my "office" and will add a little value to the house.

Our house is wired such that all the cabling for the second floor is run up a cavity in an exterior wall and then dropped from the attic into the rooms. I could attempt to snake cables up, but is is very tight and full of 120V AC, I've been zapped before and really don't want to mess with this mess. After staring at a lot of walls and the unfinished basement ceiling I realized there was a return air "duct" that ran from the master bedroom to the basement. The heating guys were using the interior of a wall for a duct and had just cut a hole between the first and second floor. It was a straight shot from the attic to the basement, what luck! I got on the net and ordered 1000' feet of CAT6, a bunch of wall plates, jacks and some tools.

A plenum is "an air-filled space in a structure; especially : one that receives air from a blower for distribution (as in a ventilation system)". There are plenum and non-plenum rated network cabling. One gives off noxious deadly fumes when it burns and the other does not. So I had 1000' feet of non-plenum cable and I was about to run it through an air duct in the master bedroom. My visions of burning network cable in the basement killing us upstairs before we even had a chance were not sitting well with me.

The alternative to using plenum rated cabling is to put the cabling in a fireproof conduit. My choice, 1.5" Electrical Metallic Tubing (EMT) tubing, it's thick galvanized steel and is cheap. It will be big enough for all the CAT6 to the second floor and small enough to fit through the cavity easily.

I bought two 10 foot segments of tubing from Home Depot:



Two bends, one for the top, on for the bottom:



And some screw on couplings:



The ends of the tubes are pretty rough, I don't want the cabling sitting on fine metal burrs, so I polish the exits of the bends smooth before going into the attic.