Tips to Wire Your Home for Telephone and Cable

You can save a great deal of money if you are building or renovating a house by doing some of the work yourself. Take the communications wiring needed in every home as an example. The telephone and cable wiring needed can be done by you and you can save the money the installation would cost if done by the cable or phone company. The telephone guys are going to charge you a fee for the trip out to your house and running the wiring up to the m.P.E. Or Minimum Point of Entry. That is the box they attach to your home and this is where the outside wiring stops, and the internal wiring into your home begins.

If that lineman has to come into your home and install more than one phone jack, you are going to pay extra for it. And each and every phone jack he puts in. Got a lot of rooms? Most folks have a phone jack in their living room, their kitchen, the master bedroom and any other room the family is likely to spend a good deal of time in. Like a den or maybe a playroom or the garage or basement. That's a lot of jacks and at 35+ bucks a jack, the expense can mount rapidly. And it doesn't stop there. There are going to be activation fees, state and federal taxes, surcharges and subscribers fees and even charges for secondary lines for separate numbers on the same bill.

So lets learn to save some money and shave off a few hundred dollars from these installation charges at least. First, determine just how many telephones you are going to have in use. Let's say with the living room, the kitchen, the master bedroom, the basement, the garage and finally a phone for an in house office we will need 6 telephones. A trip over to the electronics store will get us all the parts you will need. What you are going to look for are called phone biscuits. But more on these later. We want some two conductor telephone wire suitable for outside or inside use. And you want a good pair of wire strippers and a flat bladed screwdriver. Get enough wire to travel from the m.p.e to each phone location in a consecutive run. Said another way, the wire is going to go from the m.p.e to the first phone location, and from there to the second phone and so forth.

Back at the house spread everything out where you can see it. Now these phone biscuits are just a square plastic box about the size of a nice chewy brownie. The top of it pops off and what you see inside is a set of screws and wires, already assembled and attached to a modular telephone connector. You want to put one of these biscuits at the location where your telephone is going to be placed, or at least within say about six feet of there. When you go out to the m.p.e and use the screw driver to open the customer accessible side of the box you will see exactly where you are able to attach your brand new phone wires. Using the handy dandy wire strippers skin off a couple inches of insulation from the wire reel of phone wire you are carrying with you and attach the wires to the screws inside the m.p.e. Remember this little mantra...Right Red Ring ! The red wire always goes on the right and it provides the voltage that allows your phone to ring. Right,red,ring! The other wire is green and will always go on the left screw. That is really all there is to it.

We run a wire from the red and green screws inside the m.p.e. to the first phone location. This wire has to get into the house some way and the fastest and easiest is by way of drilling a hole through the outside wall and running the wire ithrough the basement and then up through the floor into the room and placed where you want your phone to be. With the wire in the room, now is when you want to connect that red and green wire to the two screws inside the biscuit. This phone, is now active. All you have to do is attach one of those premade phone extension cords to the modular jack made into the biscuit and the other end of the cord goes to the phone, and as fast as that you have a dial tone.

Now you want to get the dial tone to all the other phones as well. So skin off some more insulation from you wire and attach red to red and green to green inside the biscuit and running the wire back down through the floor, continue your run to the next location and then the next and so on. Each biscuit serves as the connection for the next phone on down the line. This is the fast and easy way to do it.

But it is not the most reliable of methods even though it works very well. The drawback to this method is that each phone after the first location phone, is dependent upon the phone before it. If say the phone wire for phone number two gets cut, then phone number two, and all the phones after it, will no longer function. The most reliable method is to run a line from the m.p.e. to each phone separately. You will use up a lot of line this way, but the upside is that if one phone line is damaged, it won't compromise all the other phones down stream from it.

Each method has its merits, you just need to select the one that suits you.

As for cable installation there is a method of combining the telephone and cable connections. This plan is really only practical on new home construction. You can purchase a combination phone and cable wall plate. This plate has the modular phone jack built right in and it has the familiar threaded cable connector. I say this is really a new home construction option due to the fact that this plate mounts in the wall which means it needs a steel container box mounted on a wall stud to support everything. With no dry wall having been put up, you will be free to run all of your phone lines and television cable runs right to the plates. Once the dry wall is up, and the home is finished, you will have phones and cable available in all rooms.