Live data from Hacker News

Wiring my home with fiber

sschueller.github.io

221–230 of 305 posts

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#221

I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.

Yeah, all my walls are filled with loose cables taped together. I wish I had nice things like conduits.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#222
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe where you live. All of our walls (and I mean all) are solid concrete.

Hence one reason why DIY is nearly unheard of in most of Europe and Asia (that and lack of space for tools).

Europeans are the most inclined to modify stuff around their homes in my experience. In Asia I don’t see it at all.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#223
post #42

I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.

> I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls. I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious. Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit…

> I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.

Well, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly the thinking behind that.

The other response is correct that it’s nicer to have it all covered up though. I guess it comes down to a bit of perfectionism. If I stick everything on the walls I will always feel like there is work left to do.

That said, our living room is still (3 years in) a mess of (nice, not industrial) on-wall conduits.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#224
post #63
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls. I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious. Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit…

Do I understand correctly you're proposing to just run it on the outside of walls/ceilings? How would you ever again close doors that it needs to go through? My aesthetic requirements are basically zero (to the dismay of my partner indeed; we meet in the middle) but I do want to be able to practically use the apartment still.

Do it like the real high class cable installers do: run the wires on the outside of the house and just drill through the walls where you want the drops. Looks fine from the inside!

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#225
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've watched the video and I still don't understand how you get the wire through the conduit though. Part of the video seemed to happen through telekinesis: the part where a wire magically came out of the wall, allowing you to pull from the other side.

You have to have a wire installed in the first place(i.e coax or just a simple thin but strong wire). That wire is installed when you install the walls/gypsum. Then you use it to pull whatever you need(hdmi etc). When you pull the new wire(hdmi) you attach an additional wire at the tip so that you can pull back your initial wire once your new HDMI is in place. If you don't have an initial wire installed you can use a…

You use two semi-stiff snake tapes with hooks on the ends. The idea is to snag the hooks.

The biggest skill is you have to hold your jaw just right when you do it. Then, it’s a piece of cake.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#226

I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.

I'm moving into my new home (which was built in 1962) in the next month or two. My plan is to run cat 6 throughout, before I get the bulk of my stuff/furniture in. Hopefully I won't need to smash into too many walls but there will be a few. Definitely worth it in the long run though.

There are so many things I think about "if I had just done X in those few weeks before moving in the furniture".

This is an opportunity - you might want to brainstorm X.

anything in the kitchen (before you start depending on it for food and/or fill the fridge with perishable stuff)

mindfully adding specific storage. Could be the difference between moving in and piling all your stuff in random places.

related: garage - before it becomes the "catch all" for unresolved boxes of stuff you move with. A friend said overpaying closetworld for cabinets around the perimeter of his garage was money well spent.

adding electrical outlets, switches, etc

and yeah, cat5 or fiber

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#227
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of house needs 18 AP? Was this in an existing house or an house being constructed?

It was a new house. The 18 AP locations serve a couple of different long run purposes and reasons: The first is to have direct nearly-line of sight locations for the majority of the house which is primarily to support higher frequency(60GHz) and beyond which have poor wall penetration. The second is to provide good wifi coverage due to signal attenuation from the construction techniques. I did many of the walls in do…

> It is also a somewhat large (>10,000 sq ft, ~ 1000 sq meters) house

Understatement of the month right here.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#228

For those wondering, as the OP didn't mention it super-clearly imho - but his internet provider is able to do 25gbit [1] for CHF 69 a month (+ CHF ~340 set up cost) CHF 1 ~= USD 1 these days Question for OP: Why did you build such an expensive "router" - you justify it by saying you also want to run PiHole, but you probably could have done this whole setup much cheaply [1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/

The router is more of a server. Pihole is just an example (and yes a $35 pi would be plenty for it) but I have many old servers running all kinds of other things so I decided to update and consolidate some of this.

Has the 5800x and opnsense been able to successfully route 25Gbit/s? It's very rare to find anyone running even a 10Gbit link on opnsense/pfsense so it's difficult to know how it performs on high speed links with modern hardware. Would love any details you could share on this! (Might be worth updating your blog post with them)

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#229
post #5

This article is great overall, but there is some stuff you should do differently, if you're wanting to follow in the author's footsteps: 1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to. 2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negl…

what's the big difference between single and multi mode fiber? Why is it scalable but multi-mode isn't?

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#230
Is fiber overall less power hungry than twisted pair or copper? Asking for solar rural aspirations deep into my mind. I like the idea of it not being conductive thus not vulnerable to electrical discharges.
Post reply on HN