Telephone Wiring Question

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in part:

Screw terminal 6p4c (RJ11) jacks? Sounds like daisy-chaining Cat5e -- running phone line from one jack to the next. Run a toner to trace the lines thru walls. If you're very lucky, some villianous drywaller just covered over your junction box (closet, most likely).

Sometimes short daisy-chains can be converted to star by cutting in the middle, and box-splices. Not std, but usually works.

-- Robert

Sounds like a typical electrician's job of installing phone lines. a) They daisy chain the jacks. b) They use wire nuts for splices in the attic. c) They use CAT3 cable d) The use CAT5 jacks in the wall and then all of the above.

As Robert pointed out, having two sets of the white/blue pair under the same two screw terminals is a dead give-away of daisy chaining. Umm...I assume they are screw terminals, but then I've seen guys punch down two conductors on the same 110 type IDC tab.

Humorous side note...sent a kid over to Scotch Loc two 25-pair cables in an outdoor box. He came back with far to many unused Scotch Locs.

---------- | Hole #1 White/Blue Cable 1 & White/Blue Cable 2 | | Hole #2 Blue/White Cable 1 & Blue/White Cable 2

----------

Anyway...Since you have two cable up in the demarc, you apparently have two sets of daisy chains.

Thx for the quick responses....

Yep, they are screw terminals... I have access to a toner, so just for kicks and giggles I'll give that a whirl tomorrow night...

Worst case, its what I was afraid of, Daisy chained.... and I'll have to figure out a way to get to the demarc with the least amount of hassle....

One other question:

Lets say there are two distinct chains running through the house... what would be the reason for having both connected to the jacks the same way?

I thought about branched (upstairs and downstairs) then chained, but wouldn't one of the jacks only have one cat5 cable...

They are daisy-chained. The chain does not start at the demark; there must be jacks somewhere that are the end.

Figure out what segment goes where. Make a map. Spice the orange pairs as needed to get where you want.

bajansen wrote in part:

I suspect you don't have two chains, but only one with a single run from the demark to the alarm to do the RJ-49X(?) alarm pass-thru/cutoff.

Yep. That would be the end of the chain. Of course, the cable could be to some odd space (garage?) as an end.

-- Robert

Sometimes they go from the demarc to 1 outlet where there are 3 cables. From there, one cable loops around to all of the first floor outlets and a second goes from that outlet up stairs and loops around to all of those outlets.

CIAO!

Ed N.

bajansen wrote:

And often the electrician will run his cables the easiest way at that particular stage of construction of the house and may not logically make sense as for logical layout of the rooms.

RJ-31X or RJ-37X depending on if it is a supervised circuit or not. RJ-37X has some additonal shorting contacts to alert when the alarm system is unplugged.

Well, I haven't quite figured this one out yet.

The alarm system was hooked up after the phone line was active. They ADT guy did change the wiring when he came in. He removed both cat5e's from the demarc (both were connected, same leads, same posts) and hooked the cat5e voice to the demarc.

There is an RJ-31X at the panel in the closet upstairs, and then it looks like two other leads from the voice cat5e were spliced into both of the other cat5e's for the phone (brown/orange from the security to both blue/whites on the phones). Definately a cutoff....

I will have to move some furniture again and reconfirm that all jacks have two cables coming into them.

All this just to add a phone to a room. I'm probably gonna have to go through the outside wall then down to the demarc (something I really wanted to avoid)...