Phone Wiring DIY question

Rattlehead_ie

Hi guys Im actually trying to clean up the wiring in my home at the mo.
Specially my phone lines that have been in the house for nearly 35 years.
Anyone able to take a pic or know how the eircom NID (box outside your house that the phone line enters) should look like inside the wiring?
I have 3 wires
1 is the line in
Another I can follow to the phone line(where my phone is)
The 3rd disapears into the attic and I cant find out where that goes at all? Any help would be great.

Lex Luthor

Telephones need 2 wires to operate. If you have access to a multimeter, set it to voltage and you should typically get 48V DC across the working pair....it can be either + or -.
I'll have a look outside tomorrow at mine, but I guess the colour codes have changed in 35yrs, maybe not.

Rattlehead_ie

Oh yeah sorry I should explained better.
The are 3 main cables coming into the NID(inside the 3 cables are the 2 wires u speak of) now as I said
One cable(containing2wires) comes from st
One cable(containing2wires) goes into house through door frame to Master phone socket
Other cable(containing2wires) goes into attic and disapears in there, Ill make a drawing, give me while

Rattlehead_ie

Borzoi

Rattlehead_ie wrote:

Oh yeah sorry I should explained better.
The are 3 main cables coming into the NID(inside the 3 cables are the 2 wires u speak of) now as I said

Old telephone wire is just two core twisted pair, that's all that runs to your house. In your case it looks like that's split - one cable to your phone, one cable to parts unknown. What do you actually want to do?

Rattlehead_ie

well one the phone line is crackling seriously\broadband problem. The second main reason is it must be one of the wires in the attic so I wanted to maybe cut the 3rd cable and pull it through.
We dont have anything else except the one phone(dsl)line -no eircom alarm - which connects to the Master socket. so I dont know what 3rd one is and want to hopefully pull it through and clean up attic. if possible

dingding

Disconnect the wire that you don't think you need and see does everything still work. If is does then you dont need it.

:cool:

el Bastardo

I did one of these jobs on an English phoneline. The line had the same colours (green/red pair), was connected to a BT box and had been badly split into multiple phone sockets. I just removed everything that I didn't need and wired a new line into the house from the BT box.

So, if you don't know what it's for, then you probably don't need it.

Rattlehead_ie

Ok figured out that the 3rd cable is the OLD wiring for the phone.
So I want to go snip it and get rid of cable in the attic, only thing is Im afraid that it being connected to the other 2 cables it may be creating a circuit that I might break?Any electricians round?