Dodgy Phone Socket

eirebhoy

I bought a phone socket in peats a few months ago and wired it up myself with a bit of trial and error. It was a dodgy piece of work and unsurprisingly my phone has stopped working. My internet still works strangely enough. Anyway, I rang BT who put me on to an Electrician (1800 number) and they said the minimum call out charge was €102. There's no way I'm paying that for a simple piece of work. Could anyone recommend a cheap electrician?

randombar

There's only two wires needed to connect the actual phone to the phone cable, i reckon a bit of trial and error and you could be able to do it yourself!

eirebhoy

Yeah but the socket is terrible. It's getting stood on by people walking up the stairs. The cables look very poor too hanging out of all directions. I also don't want to lose my internet connection now as that's more important than the phone (since we all have mobiles). Actually, I can't do without the internet so that's the biggest worry. I'd prefer a professional job done on it but €102 is a bit too costly. If I can't get it done for 30-40 quid I'll then do it myself.

coldfeet

All you need to do is strip back the red and green wire and terminate them onto the socket. Then plug a dsl splitter into the socket and plug the BB and phone into it.

eirebhoy

There's 4 wires. Two blue & white (one with bigger white stripes, the other with bigger blue stripes), 2 orange and white (same as previous, one with big white stripes, the other not).

If I remember correctly the socket has 4-8 different connections. I suppose I'll just open it up again and try.

coldfeet

If its a standard telephone socket it will have 4 screw down terminals, terminite the blue and white onto the terminals 2 and 3,

ethernet

Essentially:

• Red = mainly blue and white wire.
• Green = mainly white and blue wire.

Have you any extension sockets?

Connect the blue-white wire to the red terminal on the socket and white-blue to the green terminal. Make things easy and use a socket with screws and not the IDC terminals which require a special tool.

I bought surface-mounted sockets [screw terminals] in Atlantic Homecare. Working well and didn't cost too much.

eirebhoy

Ah it was easy. One of the orange cables came out and I just connected it back up. I still think I'll buy a decent socket though. This one's too small.