Spaghetti Phone Wiring
The other weekend, I moved the Wifi Hub from the backroom to the middle of the house. We’d also been getting some issues with the broadband dropping out so it seemed a good opportunity to check if there were any issues.
This mostly involved crawling in the loft, drilling long holes, a bit of head-scratching and a lot of reading. My first step was to take a look at the wiring between the cable entering the house and the master socket. I found a horrible mess of tape. I knew you weren’t supposed to change the wiring between the post and the master socket so it was a case of checking for loose connections, making sure the cables were properly supported and making it look a bit neater. So I fitted the box to the beam, removed an extension that had been fitted to one of the bedrooms and cable clipped the wires in place. There was still a second line connected up but as I had no reason to disconnect that I left it in place. There was actually a third line connected up too which is hooked up to a burglar alarm but that one looked ok and I did not need to change it.
Now that I had a good starting point, I needed to fit a wire between the rooms. As mentioned, this mostly comprised of drilling some long holes. I used a twisted pair cable with 4 pairs. Only 3 wires are used for standard telephone wiring but it is useful to have the others in case I want to connect anything else up.
I mentioned lots of reading, this was mostly about the colour codes of the wiring and what the different signals are. Basically, there is a pair of wires for the signal and a third wire for the ringing. As you can see from the first photos there are 2 wires coming into the building. This is where the master socket comes in. That splits off the ringing signal from the voice signal and turns it from 2 wires to 3. These components are also used when the “line test” is done as they give a distinctive characteristic to the electrical properties.
I did look at using a socket with a built in filter but that seemed to be unreliable and I swapped it out for a microfilter that was known to be working. What I didn’t realise is that leaving your router unplugged for a while causes the system to do a bunch of self tests so that could have been why things were unstable for a period after I’d plugged in back in again.
Once I had connected things up. I could fit the WiFi hub on a shelf in the office. This allows for a good signal in all parts of the house but we do have some mains repeaters for those things that needed ethernet.
Since making the change things do seem to be a bit more reliable so hopefully no further changes will be needed.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
