How to wire your house with ethernet

Reason/Need

This post is made specifically to document the networking portions of my house wiring that I recently had to do (5/3/14). I basically wanted to install Ethernet wall outlets in all of the bedrooms, the living room and \ the basement. By providing an Ethernet outlet in each room, I no longer needed to rely exclusively on WiFi for my Internet connections. A hard wire also provides a more reliable network connection which is something that was necessary since WiFi was in the basement and my desktop was on the first floor.

The basis of what I had to do was cut holes into my walls and then use the open basement ceilings to do the wiring. I then connected all of my outlets to a main switch which connected to my WiFi router (so that they can all be in the same LAN) and then to the cable modem. It is important to use the router for DHCP so your LAN can share files across different devices, unless of course you don't want to do that...

Required Items

For this project I opted for 2 Ethernet jacks per outlet, Cat6 cables for future proofing and super fast LAN file transfer speeds. There are 5 rooms that needed to have outlets installed, but the basement required 2 outlets. I also had two spools to make wiring easier through the house easier. It adds to the cost, but it saves you a lot of work if you are doing two Ethernet jacks per outlet.

1 Green Ethernet Spool of Cat6 $128
1 Orange Ethernet Spool of Cat6 $128
6 Cat6 RJ-45 Toolless Keystone - Green $5.38 x 6 = $33
6 Cat6 RJ-45 Toolless Keystone - Orange $5.24 x 6 = $32
6 1-Gang Low Voltage Mounting Bracket $7.29 x 6 = $44
6 Wall Plates for Keystones, 2 Hole $6.45 x 6 = $39
1 RJ-45 Modular Plug Tester $10
1 Bag of 100pc Cat6 Plug Solid W/Insert 50U $12
1 8P8C RJ-45 Network Cable Crimper $10
1 16 port Gigabit Switch $70
1 Wireless Gigabit Router $137

Estimated Cost: ~$643

Picture Walkthrough

Here we have a hole that we cut in the wall with a 1 Gang Low Volt Bracket installed. These are pretty simple to install, just make sure the back piece is against the top and bottom of the wall. We already snaked the Ethernet cord down from the ceiling. 

Here is a green keystone that I have already wired up. Basically, you will just need to strip the outer layer, snake the 4 pairs through the small opening, place them in according to pattern B and then close the top. I recommend using a wrench of some form to close the top and bottom. I had a lot of trouble doing this which just my fingers. Please note, you MUST follow the B pattern on the keystone. As this will be very important when you need to crimp the other side of the cable to plug into the switch. If you need help with crimping the other end of the keystone cable, I have written a tutorial which you can find in this link.

Closer view of the keystones #1. 

Closer view of the keystones #2.

Closer view of the keystones #3.

Once you have all of the keystones setup, place them into the wall plate and mount it onto the low volt bracket. 

Wall Plate with Keystones all setup.

Now you want to test to see if everything is working properly. In order to test, just plug in a known working cables into the outlet and into the cable tester as seen above. Then on the opposite end, plug in the other half of the cable tester into the end of keystone wire that you had just crimped. If the numbers on the second cable tester goes from 1-8 sequentially, then your wire is working properly!

Here is a picture of the ceiling area with all of the Ethernet wiring.

More wiring, but bunched up and hidden away along the top of the basement ceiling. 

The ends of each keystone fully tested and plugged into my switch.

End Notes

This was my first experience doing a home networking project of this scale, but I think it worked out pretty well. I now live in a place that has Ethernet outlets across all rooms, so if wireless ever becomes an issue, I can always add in a wireless router on the first floor. I can also get internet reliably using Ethernet for my desktop which was one of my main requirements. File sharing and having media stream across different rooms will now be much faster and more reliable. Overall, this project made the Internet more accessible for devices that did not have WiFi and cost me under $700 in equipment costs to fully network my home. I would like to thank those who have helped me with this project because 4 people doing wiring is much easier than doing it all yourself. I hope this project document will help others in the future who are also looking to install Ethernet wall plates in their homes. 

If you have any questions about anything networking related in this post, please feel free to ask. :)

Special thanks to Adam, Eric and Erik!