Hiding wiring?

What are the best ways you've found to hide wiring. In the past, i had some problems with my wireless internet and just decided to go the ethernet route instead. However, i have to run the ethernet cord around a doorway and want to hide the wiring in a way that isn't permanent (I don't want to ruin the paint with sticky tape, etc.) what would be the best option that would cause the least amount of damage when removed?

An alternative to hiding, if your woodwork is painted white, is just to buy white Ethernet cable and tack it to the frames with white coloured staples. We have our phone cable routed like this in two rooms and I rarely notice it.

Put the wiring *IN* the wall - and don't remove it later.

I ran a whole bunch of Ethernet this week in my house. Everything depends on how your rooms are setup. In my case, I had my Dish Network installer bring coax cable from the dish into my living room through the garage and up through the living room floor behind my TV stand. I used this hole to get my Ethernet cable down into the garage, where I could feed it through into my basement.

Then, from my second floor, I used an electrician's fish tape to pull the wire from my basement up to the second floor on the side of my laundry chute. The laundry chute was handy because it goes from 2nd floor to 1st floor to basement, and there was a nice big gap between it and the surrounding wallboard, which made fishing the wire relatively easy.

If you don't have a laundry chute, maybe you can find a closet that's above another closet where drilling larger holes in the floor won't be a big deal.

A less invasive option would be to use power line Ethernet adaptors to bridge the gap between floors. I think those top out at around 4mbps (at least they used to), but are probably more stable than wireless (haven't used them myself.)

Running cable between rooms on the same floor is pretty simple. You can sometimes get it under or behind your baseboards, under the outer edge of wall-to-wall carpet, etc. Failing that, you can use some rounded cable raceways to hide the cable, but those often just bring more attention to the cable. If you just have to go through a doorway, I'd drill through the wall next to the doorway and patch the holes whenever you need to move it. I'd avoid wires going through the doorway itself if possible.

Is there carpet at this doorway?

Sometimes the carpet has a seam at the doorway, or if not can at least be pulled up enough to sneak the ethernet cable under it.

I've successfully run ethernet, telephone, and TV cable wires in the little gap between the wall and the carpet tack strip. Sometimes you don't even need to pull up the carpet to do it, just get a big screwdriver and poke the cable into the gap; there's a little resistance and then FOOMP the cable disappears into the gap. (Don't use your fingers, those carpet tack strips are sharp if you push too hard.) When you get to the doorway, you have to pull up the carpet there but you're essentially doing the same thing. Sometimes you have to make a gap in the carpet tack strip at the meeting point between the door transom and the tack strip, because the cable is essentially going from one side of a tack strip to the other at that point.

In theory they top out at 200mbps line speed now. However my experience with them has been mixed.

I swapped from wifi for connecting my servers in the garage to powerline Ethernet over a year ago (as I was frustrated with how unreliable the wifi link was becoming). I started with the 14mbps ones and to start with I was getting near the theoretical max line speed.

Before Christmas I noticed that the line speed I was getting had dropped to under 4mbps. I messed about plugging in different sockets but none of that helped.

So I decided to invest in some 200mbps ones. I started with the Netgear ones. They were awful with my power grid. They were reporting 10mbps line speed, but in reality I was getting less than 2mbps once you took into account the number of lost packets I was getting.

So I tried the Devolo ones. They were a bit better. Out of the box I was getting a reliable 20mbps. With a bit of socket switching I bumped it up to about 30mbps one direction and 60 the other.

I did find two major sources of noise on the power grid, the worst being some wireless light dimmers and the other being one of the servers that I am trying to connect. With the dimmers and the servers disconnected I can manage about 110mbps.

But I can't unplug them permanently so I am stuck at 20mbps.

However they still work more reliably than my wifi at the moment.

I picked up the DLink 200mbit adaptors for the apartment I'm in, and with 4 of them plugged in at various parts in the apartment, I'm getting a reliable 50mbit speed. I haven't done much fiddling with them yet, as a stable 50mbit connection has been better then wireless thus far.

I think once a firmware update ships for my dual band router to go to Draft 2 N, I may go back to wireless on the N equipment I have. The 5ghz range is nice and clear currently, so speeds there could probably average near 100mgit.

Weird that your server would be generating so much noise. Time for a new (high-quality) power supply?

Wow, I think I need some help from you, Andy.

First off, how are you measuring the speed between the two adapters? I use two of these in my place, and I've not been happy with the speeds. For example, I'm currently transferring some large files from my machine to the one downstairs, and my file copy app is reporting speeds of 875-950KBps. So that's what, around 7mbps? It's barely enough to stream your average AVI file at a little under DVD quality, but not enough for DVD rips or my 720 MKV files.
*edit* So you know, I'm using the 85mbps adapters. Naturally, I don't expect to get that, but I'd like to get more than 7 */edit*

Any advice? I pretty much have zero choice as to where the adapters are plugged in (I may be able to move one of them just a little).

I've been using these adapters for years now and for the most part I've been extremely pleased with them. I always recommend them to others when they say how tough it is for them to network their home. I've only run into a single case where I just couldn't get them to work, but it was in a house with a really oddly-built addition, going from one end of the home to another. I'm sure there was something funky in the wiring that was keeping it from working.

And Andy, you are so right about these things being a solution to unreliable wireless. That's the whole reason I went with them. After all the hassle of attempting to get wireless working, I always tell people that these powerline adapters are like magic. You just plug the things in and they work.

It depends on what adapters you are using. There is normally a tool available that will query the adapters to find out what line speed they are getting.

In theory if your adapters are HomePlug compatible (the Netgear 200mbps ones are not) then many of the tools that ship with various adapters should work. The HomePlug AV Utility that I am using reports raw line speed and also "coded" speed, the second of which I believe is equivalent to quote Ethernet line speeds. There is around a 25% difference between the two.

This means that even at 85mbps the maximum raw data speed you can expect is around 65mbps, which is around 8MBps. If you were using ftp you might expect to see close to 80% of the raw data speed, so with an optimally working 85mbps you might see 6.5MBps ftp speed.

Windows network shares seem to run at about half the speed of ftp, so you might expect 3.5MBps. So assuming you were talking about Windows networking you are probably achieving about a third of the optimal maximium speed.

Some of my estimates above are probably a little rough, but hopefully they are roughly in the right area.

The only advice I can offer if you don't have any choice on sockets is to unplug everything else in the house and turn one thing at a time back on until you find any noisy things. When you find the source of the noise remove it or try plugging it in elsewhere.

In theory I guess you could a noise suppressor on the noisy devices, but I haven't actually tried that yet.

That's what I did in my last place because they hadn't put any cabling upstairs except for power (no telephone, ethernet, audio - nothing) I found it very easy to make a small hole in the wall and run a jigsaw all the way up. Great fun at the time but I had some nagging doubts when I stepped back and saw the centimetre wide strip I had removed floor to ceiling. After popping in some sensible ducting from ground floor to attic with drops at useful places It was dead easy to plaster in and paper over with no obvious sign. Wireless is okay, but it isn't gigabit ethernet!!

Huh?

Usually just a small hole near the floor, and perhaps another near the ceiling, are all that's ever needed.

???

Who needs holes?

Usually I know - but it was my first proper use of that power tool and I got carried away! It was an amazingly badly constructed wall actually - there was no way to get behind the plasterboard as it was filled with a strange metallic mesh with insulating materials in each void. I would have had to drill through each one to get a cable all the way through.

Yeah, the cut-and-stuff is one way to do it, but as mark mentioned, the preferable way is to fish the cable through the wall. This is *much* easier on an internal wall without an insulated cavity of course.

If you have a tall baseboard you can remove it and make a hole behind it - that way you don't even have to patch it to cover it back up again. On the second floor you'd have to drill through the bottom member of the wall (likely a 2x4 in NA residential construction). You'd do this also inside the wall - you can get crafty by using a flexible drill attachment.

What I did in my current place was to make a rather large hole just above the baseboard in one of my spare bedrooms. It's about 10" x8" and allowed me to manage a whole bunch of cables and a large satellite multiswitch. I covered the hole with a vent cover and it simply looks like an air-return vent. This enabled me to extract the multiswitch and pull up some of the wiring I didn't want left behind while selling the home.

The horizontal runs of wiring are in the attic and basement, so everything goes vertical between the first and second floors. In my new home we've had a conduit installed by the builder that runs in the wall from the attic to the basement so we can run cabling without the additional drilling and patching work.

Hollow walls in the UK usually (AFAIK) have horizontal noggins that stop you from passing a wire up a wall behind the cavity like this. I'd also say that a wall filled with insulation is a well constructed one, not a bad one!

Life is *so* much easier if you have a void under the floor or live in a bungalow

I managed to do some extensive cat5/alarm wiring by hiding it behind coving. You can also drill a small (20-30mm) hole in coving and use rods to push it through and then just plaster the hole.

I'd attach piccies but you can't see anything

It was easier having cat5 run when the house was built

Yeah, but (in our case) they didn't have CAT5 in the 1930's

Or 1800's in my case, and they thought 3ft of stone would be a good idea for walls!

I'd take that over having cat5 pre installed

Actually, with quite a bit of ingenuity, and help from my good friend Cris, I've largely managed to get Cat5, aerial cable and other stuff round under carpets, in hollow skirting boards and other trunking. The other problem was that Wi-Fi wouldn't get through the walls, so the network had to be Cat5.
As well as for the network, Cat5 is used to remotely control the kitchen computer, which is well away from the fumes and possibility spillage accidents in a large hall cupboard (Thanks,Tahir), Cat5 is also used for a Milestone AV Sender from one end of the house to the other.

Fortunately, our place seems to have plenty of space between the floor and the ceiling below, and under the ground floor, so when I do finally get around to running CAT5, that's how I'll be doing it. I'll probably take advantage of the defunct chimneys as well. If I didn't have that option, I'd definitely be looking at hollow skirting boards, and space behind coving.