[SOLVED] Home wiring mess

[jamesw1906]

I have a home wired for Cat5. All the wires in the closet were cut and dangling. I made the effort to wire then all to a patch panel.
The remaining issue is that I was only able to identify about 5 of the 30 to the wall plates. I have gone through two different sets of Wire Tone Generator, Tracers. But can't find how to find there these wire go.

I've done some attic and crawl space tracking. But most of the runs seem to be out of site. Any ideas, tricks of the trade to see where these wires are/go?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Dylan_35]

https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/44844/how-can-i-find-out-which-ethernet-cable-goes-where

Hope this helps

 

[bill001g]

I will assume by a tracker you mean the device you clip a little transmitter on one end and then take a little probe device and listen to see if you hear tone when you put it near the wires.

That is your best option. It tend to be very tedious when there are lots of wires. You need to be sure that the transmitter actually is on the wires and not on the plastic insulation. You need to strip it off if they are bare wires. For wall jacks most those devices have a phone plug thing that you can plug in to make contact.

They make high power ones mostly to find electircal cable in walls. They send out enough signal that you can detect it though the wall board from about 6 inches. Unlike the cheap ones where you have to almost touch the wire to detect the signal.

The only other trick that sometimes works is if you can get enough cable to see distance numbers. Most cable has a ft marking on it that lets the installer know how much cable is left in the box. So if you stat with 1000ft and you ran 20ft one end would say 1000ft and the other 980. These are marked about ever 2ft on the cable. You sometimes can guess which cable is which by comparing these numbers and estimating how many feet it should be between the 2 locations.

There really is no simple way it is lots of tedious testing. I know where I used to work they tended to just remove the cable and rerun it all when they change around work areas because it ended up being cheaper because of the high labor costs to keep the old and rework it.

 

[punkncat]

I would guess that you have trimmed out network and phone connections around the house, and this closet with the cut off cables is your "head end"?

It's a rather unfortunate thing that many installers have gotten away from using actual phone wire for that, and keep CAT wire for networking...but it does offer other advantages and additional pairs.
As above your best best is a tone generator for location and then you can get more detailed with equipment to check the pairs as well as schedule. You generator should have two sized jack ends, one for phone which is small and square, the other will be larger and rectangular. Try to find a type of generator that also checks for continuity. Continuity doesn't tone. With wires cut off they could be touching.
Phone lines can be run in parallel typically out of ~3 jacks and almost always won't be more than two pair (blue and orange normally). Network in a traditional enviro should be all four pair and single runs.
It is within possibility that you have runs made for either network or cameras that are not trimmed out or hidden to your view.

By and large if you have attic and crawl access you will save headaches running new cabling, if you can.

 

[jamesw1906]

I will assume by a tracker you mean the device you clip a little transmitter on one end and then take a little probe device and listen to see if you hear tone when you put it near the wires.

That is your best option. It tend to be very tedious when there are lots of wires. You need to be sure that the transmitter actually is on the wires and not on the plastic insulation. You need to strip it off if they are bare wires. For wall jacks most those devices have a phone plug thing that you can plug in to make contact.

They make high power ones mostly to find electircal cable in walls. They send out enough signal that you can detect it though the wall board from about 6 inches. Unlike the cheap ones where you have to almost touch the wire to detect the signal.

The only other trick that sometimes works is if you can get enough cable to see distance numbers. Most cable has a ft marking on it that lets the installer know how much cable is left in the box. So if you stat with 1000ft and you ran 20ft one end would say 1000ft and the other 980. These are marked about ever 2ft on the cable. You sometimes can guess which cable is which by comparing these numbers and estimating how many feet it should be between the 2 locations.

There really is no simple way it is lots of tedious testing. I know where I used to work they tended to just remove the cable and rerun it all when they change around work areas because it ended up being cheaper because of the high labor costs to keep the old and rework it.

Yeah, very tedious indeed. I was optimistic that the more expensive equipment would allow me to detect the signal under floor and in walls. That would be has been extremely helpful. Guess, it's a lot more crawling to figure out this issue.