For that age they seem quite similar, stud walls and fire breaks with plastered wooden slats all sitting on joists with a brick outer and supporting brick chimney. Modern is totally different.
We have a huge variety of building styles, I have a basement (and my whole house is like Wendel's being a 1920 build) where as houses in the south/florida don't have basements and are built differently for hurricanes. Its quite fascinating but can be a pain as building code can be massively different area to area, but for good reasons.
@@deminybs it's an insane amount of work, but it's so rewarding. The other people bidding against us were planning on knocking it down, so it feels incredible to bring it back to life again. Glad your uncle is doing the same!
yuuuup! i installing wifi switches and the cloth just fell off so i put on heat shrink, at which point the cloth was set ablaze with the lighter before i blew it out preventing a house fire. no way i way plugging in a new OLED to that garbage. new romex and Cat6a
I need to get one too , borrowed one to get some super manky vinyl tiles of a crumbling concrete floor, way faster than using an old wood chisel and hammer.
tackling a similar project in a house I just got built in 1800. We didn't get electricity in this area until the early 30s, and it's apparent most of the wiring in the house is from that era, but luckily it's a relatively small house with not that much to it. In any case, thanks for the tips. This is my first time in a place without a parent or a landlord telling me not to cut holes in the wall so it's been a learning experience
I love that pause ... "an electrician" :awkward: ... can install a power plug there. I'm totally cracking up about how invisible your proverbial "electrician" was there... helping you. I think we actually use the same guy, Wendell! "The electrician" is such a legend. Literally. #facepalm #dadjoke #nerdydadjoke
I've thought about building my own house, if I ever do I plan to include 1" pvc piping that runs to each room so that I can easily run whatever data wiring is popular of the day.
living in the UK in a Victorian House built about 1890 we have solid brick walls it was very interesting to see in detail how a old USA House was constructed
A friend and I are finishing a retrofit and gave it the works... we've just finished up our first spool of CAT6, 3/4 pipe drops to every box, provisions for data in every room and even the uninhabited mechanical spaces. We already have a Grafan dashboard set up, but we're really looking to catch any problems before they happen with stuff like plumbing, electrical and heat. It's an expensive undertaking, but if it catches just one leaky water heater once, you've made your money over many times.
I just bought a house with lath and plaster so I'm looking at replacing the wiring in the walls because a 15 amp circuit for 3 rooms won't work. Good tips from your project. I ran cat 6 to APs and POE cameras, everything else is wireless. I know some people don't agree but my 4 Ubiquity pros cover the house well and I've never had an issue. You just need quality AP's and network cards, especially in your desktops. It will be expensive, way more than wired but you get rewarded with not having to run wall boxs.
Sadly this is more problematic in Europe (or at least Germany) because we have mainly thick brick walls or even reinforced concrete instead of hollow American walls. While I think our approach is better for isolation, it's worse for changing cables.
In America, the building codes have only changed because of nature like hurricanes and earthquakes. In Europe, building code is based on bombs and bullets. I guess the building mentally boils down to fear of invasion vs no fear of invasion. It's not something I've really thought about until I read your comment.
@@Jmystro Further, though this is somewhat more universal at least in the US rather than the Earthquake or Hurricane resistance building codes, Fire Code also dictates that commercial buildings must have their doors open on push from the inside. That way, people don't have to grasp the handles or touch them for very long if you do, and the consistency across the board tries to make sure that no one is confused about push vs pull.
@@Jmystro Europian buildings are far too beautiful to be built to protect against bombs and bullets, we call them castles. Plus the Blitz proves if that was the case, they didn't do a very good job.
@@tomtalk24 I guess no one got the joke. lol. It's about the Nazis affinity for exporting concrete and rebar to Poland and France instead of using it domestically. Imagine what Germany could of build with those resources.
Haha, when he said old house, our house is from the 1800s and that's just normal around here. Old would be at least 200 years old for me, more like 300-500.
Funny that as ~1800s UK city center buildings are built in just the same way. In fact Wendells house is only an RSJ and some plaster board away from a newbuild here! Although my shed is around the same as a newbuild over there these days.
If you don't need the crazy speeds and your building is quite new, try Powerline Ethernet. Also a great option if you're renting and aren't allowed to drill holes everywhere. A pair of Gigabit adapters are pretty cheap. Mine gets around 800-900Mbits/s which is fine for everything I do. The speeds are consistent throughout the house unlike Wi-Fi so yeah, would recommend.
Couple of additional tips. #1 The sewer stack often has room around it, giving a chase from basement to attic. #2 Metal Coat hangers make great finder bits and only leave a very small hole. Straighten out the hanger and cut one end on an angle creating a sharp point. You drill it into your attic or basement, then enter the attic/basement and find the hanger. You now know where the wall is, and can drill the larger hole for your wires. (you can also use them to test drill into the wall prior to using a larger bit)
Living in Germany (where pretty much only full brick walls exist) its always weird watching videos like this where people run wires through their walls like its nothing.
Nice informative video. I live in Historic Downtown Savannah so many of the homes here are similar to this one. Definitely picking up some Bob Vila vibes.
20:14 Yes! Those are the gang boxes to use for old work. Screw them in exactly where you want them and they are solid. Big box stores only have the flimsy drop in boxes with the tabs that grab the back side of the drywall. Or new work boxes requiring a guy to uncover the stud and nail them in.
I feel your pain! I have a home built in 1905. The walls are supported in the basement by 12x12 beams. And the base and top of the walls start with a 6x6 beam, from which the lath and plaster is secured. The outlets are in the baseboard sideways. In order to install new outlets I have to get out a hammer and chisel and carve out a space for an outlet box. Then do some really tricky measuring in the basement to drill straight through 12-18 inches of solid wood and hope I hit the box alcove I created.
Great video! This whole video reminds me of my everyday life. This is what I do, still learning all the time. I haven't installed pex or data before though.
wow for me it's amazing looking at the complete different approach you guys took and evolved over there for home construction. to me it all looks weird. i'm not being inflamatory, i couldn't give a flying IEEE1394 about "who's better" here, in fact running wires across floors like this in italy at least would be a hard NOPE unless the cilent is reeeeeally good at _motivating_ the contractor. the flexibility for modifications is inspiring. :)
I have put cat.7a in my new house based of your recommendation. Keep videos going. Also cat.7a costs pretty penny it's about 1 euro per meter but prices are dropping right now
Im gonna have to do a similar project in a few days. Lately Ive been having internet issues, and noticed the cable modem has a weak signal. I come to find out whoever built this house 30 years ago had all RG-59 Coax ontop of the AC power lines for the entire ~100-120ft run. Ive been told that this probably has is the equivalent of trying to have a conversation while a young kid is crying tight next to you. Specially since the signal coming into the house isn't that strong to begin with. And while I was rewiring that I thought, why not look into setting up some Ethernet cables to rooms where it might be useful someday.
"For any computer that you're at for more than 15 minutes, run a hard line." I wish someone would've told me this instead of figuring it out the hard way xD
this is a interesting series :D please keep the videos coming :D are you planning to do any control system for the lights? if so hopefully wired and not the wireless shit :D
I did the same thing as Wendel did to fish up through the floor but my installation was two 7/8 O.D. coolant lines, a 1/4" hole to poke cat5e through and another 1/4" hole to run a 40W 5VDC for the fans.
Is there a forum thread or video about flashing the hikvision cameras? I have 10 of them and want to wire up my home with them but they are super sketchy
in a HiK video he did, he did mention to just separate switch/router non-internet network isolate to DVR/server separate port . guarantees no outside access and easier to detect internal hacking. less sketchy than random firmware.
@@stevewang I was hoping for a good firmware in addition to isolating the networks. Or also in the cases where network flexibility is limited, firmware would be nice. Thanks!
Please save and post pictures of the old brass cover plates, bakelite receptacles and switches. That stuff is much better built than the residential grade junk they sell at the hardware stores these days.
I love all these IOT videos, they always assume you already have a rack loaded with xeon gold blades and it's all ready to go. Would like to see a starting from nothing video.
Friendly reminder to those outside the US - check if running your own ethernet wiring is legal or not. Failure to use a licensed installer may void your insurance. In Australia, you need a license for basically all cabling that is fixed into place, including TV antennas, etc now.
My housemates were trying to get me to use WIFI on my desktop because they don't like the Ethernet cable running out of my room haha. They don't realize that WIFI sucks.
From my experience best option is cat. 6a. Usually cat. 6 are not shielded, but 6a are. In modern environments there are lot electrical noise coming from poorly designed PSU that are everywhere, but mostly led lighting. Of course there are lot more things that generate EMI. With properly done cat 6a. you are immune to this. In my country price difference between cables are big. Cat 6 is 0.381€, Cat 6а is 0.559€, Cat 7а+ is 0.797€, Cat 8 is 1,042€, per meter. Interestingly they all uses 23AWG wires, but not always. One time I found 24AWG cat. 6. But one time I buy 1000 meters of cat. 7 cable that was 22AWG. People say that is good, but. When you try to buy modules you are in problem. Shielded module for standard 23AWG is 2.1€, but for 22AWG is more than 10€ per piece. For me, cat. 6a is best cable on the planet, and I use them for everything. I'm using it for data, CCTV, audio... For example one pair for signal, one for power security camera, and two pairs for two speakers. One time I used to wire 3 camera over one cable, but that was only 8 meters. Cat. 6a is ok also for transmission of audio signal unbalanced and balanced. Used for SAS protocol in casino that is similar as rs232, for over 50 meters. This is also a bet that won me an iPhone.
THIS is why i subscribe, more stuff like this more regularly and i'll be a patreon but, i want higher level stuff as i mostly know this stuff. but, i didn't know about those sweet boxes!
Are you in New England? Not much of the country has basements like that. If so, I could potentially hook you up with some HVAC stuff, whole home filters and air monitors and such.
you have conduit, you could just pull in individual wires instead of romex, probably would be easier to pull although I guess using romex saves buying a lot of excess wire that you probably wont be using elsewhere
Imagining the cost of that 48 ports 10g switch with 40g uplink. I watched Tom describe these tools and actually bought many of them for my installation. 10g for a camera is a bit overkill even 4k
You need to go over what you are running that requires 10Gbit in every room of your house, that by itself seems interesting. I've been running Cat6a (not a big price difference between it at Cat6) throughout my house and I'm planning on only having the main office get 10Gbit for ingesting into the NAS. I can't see what you'd be doing that'd require that bandwidth in say your livingroom.
Just thinking if you use steel conducts to carry the mains cables then maybe TP-Link Broadband Over mains Adapters can be used provided that the conducts are grounded to earth so no radiation gets out of the conducts
If you're really scared about making clean cuts to mount your single or double gang boxes, various companies manufacturer a blade that mounts to that oscillating tool and will cut a perfect box every single time. (Just don't get scammed. Some companies charge upwards of $50 for one, and it's complete bunkum pricing).
In my hollow brick + mortar walls, for the cables inside I have to channel the wall, reapply the mortar and paint. For cables routed from floor to floor, I route them through the outside of the house. Really, really time consuming. It stil angers me that houses are being built everyday without CAT6 installations. Seriously, it's cheap, very cheap in proportion to the cost of building a house, or even installing cables after the build.
You don't even need to have fire breaks for those long bits to just "eff" right off lol Was using one to wire the house, and when going down from a bedroom to a cavity behind a closet on the entry level (split level), keep checking the bit from time to time "White... crap, that's drywall" open the closet, hole right in to it lol Well... gonna have to mod the closet now :D
LoL...ICR to that. I had to drill horizontally through two studs to an outside wall with power cables in each cavity, next to a door. Well, I was very careful to get past the electrical using an endoscope to see the progress, only had to go through the exterior wall but something was making my bit walk on me, turns out I hit an old steel bracket from a previous door installation, managed to get through it without too much damage to the auger bit and it came out just beside the new door frame. I locked up my 5 amp corded drill several times, wrenched my wrist a half dozen times.
That old black pipe could be the old gas pipes for fixtures. Common to find electrical wires run through them as the house was switched from gas to electric lights.
If you're trying to get rid of that old TV upstairs just start taking it apart piece by piece whatever you can't take a apart use a dremel or cutting wheel make smaller pieces and a vacuum and be done
Wendel alot of old housed in the 50's were made like that hear in Australia to exactly the same we dont have basements hear though same with wiring hear in the 50's the wiring was what we use hear for light wire very small gauge wire now its only for lights and power wire is alot thicker gauge
Hi Wendell, great video! Very timely for me as I may be about to run some cables myself at home. I am wondering what equipment you plant to make smart? Is the intention just to have ethernet ports on the wall or are you going to have data wires going directly to e.g. your light switches so they can be remotely controlled? If so I would be interested to know which switches you plan to use because I am also interested to know how to make all of this secure. Will the IOT network be separate from the public internet?
Hard wiring is great. More of a hassle than wireless except personally I'd prefer to bathe in natural sunlight and not excessive EMF radiation - that and the speed and reliability isn't as good as a wired connection.
AKSHUALLY Knob and tube wires are very safe and robust, but when people tap into them and add to existing circuits (usually doing a horrible job) they become dangerous. That being said I've rewired 95% of my 1920 house, but mostly to add 20a outlets to the bedrooms and many other updates and improvements. Also i replaced 9 melted 15a outlets on the 1st floor, no idea how the people before me melted so many and didn't burn the house down, but hey here we are! See knob and tube is durable!
@@Level1Techs yup! If done right it's fine. But by now all the insulation is cracking and after 100 years it's been great, but now time to update so nothing goes wrong. Itll be interesting to see how long romex can hold up although we probably wont be around to find out!
sparkies can hardly mount a box straight or level I got a kick out of the using this box will be straight ever time. Sorry but that had a huge grin on my face when you said it I do drywall and rarely see every box in correctly in new housing let alone renovations.
My question is why is he putting in CAT6 instead of CAT8 when he wants Gbps100 networking in the future? Sure only put in CAT8 for the few rooms that you will want Gbps100 networking in as CAT8 wiring is expensive but having to rewire the house for it will be even more expensive than doing it in the first place. OR did i get it wrong and he is going to do it through aggregation of ports instead of a single port due to the limitations of how long a CAT8 cable can be?
