Running ethernet to new garden office

ct_roy

I'm putting together a basic spec for an electrician to do some low voltage work while he's doing the main electrical work for a new garden office I'm installing in a few weeks.

The electrician will be putting in an armoured cable from our main fuse box out to the garden room location which involves drilling holes in the side of the house and burying the cable out to the garden room location (approx. 20m).

I've asked him if he could run ethernet while he was at it. He's happy to do it but it's not his expertise so I'm hoping to get some advice here

Cable choice - Cat 6a outdoor cabling - I was thinking something this might be my best bet?
https://www.cablemonkey.ie/cat6a-cable/13868-cat6a-external-u-ftp-cable-ldpe-outer-sheath.html (I can give the excess cable to a friend of mine who will be doing the same task soon).

In terms of the network spec itself, I'm not looking for anything especially complex. I've a Virgin Media superhub running in modem mode with an Eero mesh wifi config up and running.

I was going to run a single Cat6a connection alongside the armoured power cable and then simply plug an eero AP at either end for ethernet backhaul between the 2 AP's.

What's the best spec to achieve the above? i.e.

1.) Should I run 2 cat6a cables for redundancy?
2.) Should they be run through some sort of ducting for additional protection (if so, can you share any recommendations where I can buy it?)
3.) Should I install wall jacks/RJ45 wall plates on either side or just have the male connectors run from the 2 points and then connect them to a switch/direct to the AP's?

Any advice/tips on how best to do this would be greatly appreciated!

krissovo

I would wire all the way back to the hub to improve bandwidth & latency rather than to the AP. Use wall plates as this will help with resilience. Truncking is not an absolute requirement with the outdoor cable but its a layer of resilience and without knowing the route I would air on the side of caution and lay it.

ct_roy

krissovo wrote: »

I would wire all the way back to the hub to improve bandwidth & latency rather than to the AP. Use wall plates as this will help with resilience. Truncking is not an absolute requirement with the outdoor cable but its a layer of resilience and without knowing the route I would air on the side of caution and lay it.

thanks krissovo, yip I'm probably going to do that separately (should be able to handle that bit myself as it doesn't involve any major drilling through external walls etc.)

Thanks for the advice re: truncking!

LenWoods

If it was mine I'd run two or even three Cat6 or even get pre-terminated cat7 from Amazon; Duronic are a good brand on there;

Keep them away from power cable as much as possible to prevent noise affecting the communications cable,
Run them inside some half inch qualplex under the ground; which is plastic heating pipe available in lengths or some places sell it cut from a 50m roll

Static M.e.

I would use some conduit pipes to run both the armoured and Cat 6 cables though. Conduit is cheap and it will protect the cables from a lot of environmental damage. It makes adding or removing any future cable requirements easy to do. I personally wouldn't bother with the outdoor cable if I was going to use the conduit.

I would definitely run at least two cables in case one of them ever gets damaged. I would use Cat 6 for simplicity and ease of crimping, tools etc.

danicm

A cat6 cable is plenty and is future proof allowing for up to 10Gbps communication, I'd personally go for outdoors type even if you install conduit, it will still be exposed to various temperatures and in particular, a fair bit of humidity.
I would run at least two cat6 cables, all the way from your router, I wouldn't bother with your AP-cable-AP idea, you will inevitably loose a lot of bandwidth and introduce latency. Even at the office side, it's ok if you want to put an WiFi AP for practicality, but I'd connect your main work computer directly with an ethernet cable.

In terms of running your cat cable alongside the armoured electrical cable, I'm not an electrician but I would imagine this goes against regulations, I think you need to run them a certain distance apart, to avoid interference from the electrical to the network cable, but also for safety reasons you don't want a possible circuit between the high voltage and the low voltage cables (e.g. someone decides to stick a shovel just where the cables are and end up nipping them both and causing the high volt to be conducted into the low volt cable frying all your equipment or worse). So if it was me I would run the cat cables on a conduit, some 4 inches apart from the armoured electrical cable. I would also put wall plates with RJ-45 female jacks at both sides as it looks more professional and if you ever need to plug something further away just use a longer patch cable.

ct_roy

Static M.e. wrote: »

I would use some conduit pipes to run both the armoured and Cat 6 cables though. Conduit is cheap and it will protect the cables from a lot of environmental damage. It makes adding or removing any future cable requirements easy to do. I personally wouldn't bother with the outdoor cable if I was going to use the conduit.

I would definitely run at least two cables in case one of them ever gets damaged. I would use Cat 6 for simplicity and ease of crimping, tools etc.

thanks for the advice
Is Cat6 different from Cat6a in terms of ease of crimping etc?

ct_roy

danicm wrote: »

A cat6 cable is plenty and is future proof allowing for up to 10Gbps communication, I'd personally go for outdoors type even if you install conduit, it will still be exposed to various temperatures and in particular, a fair bit of humidity.
I would run at least two cat6 cables, all the way from your router, I wouldn't bother with your AP-cable-AP idea, you will inevitably loose a lot of bandwidth and introduce latency. Even at the office side, it's ok if you want to put an WiFi AP for practicality, but I'd connect your main work computer directly with an ethernet cable.

In terms of running your cat cable alongside the armoured electrical cable, I'm not an electrician but I would imagine this goes against regulations, I think you need to run them a certain distance apart, to avoid interference from the electrical to the network cable, but also for safety reasons you don't want a possible circuit between the high voltage and the low voltage cables (e.g. someone decides to stick a shovel just where the cables are and end up nipping them both and causing the high volt to be conducted into the low volt cable frying all your equipment or worse). So if it was me I would run the cat cables on a conduit, some 4 inches apart from the armoured electrical cable. I would also put wall plates with RJ-45 female jacks at both sides as it looks more professional and if you ever need to plug something further away just use a longer patch cable.

Really good advice. I like the idea of keeping the outdoor ethernet in it's own conduit separate from the high voltage power.
Thanks danicm.

ct_roy

Doing some more research and I see a few people recommending using regular Cat6/6a enclosed in liquidtite conduit rather than outdoor ethernet - primarily because it's cheaper and easier to terminate. Is outdoor ethernet really that much more difficult than regular ethernet to terminate?

KeRbDoG

ct_roy wrote: »

Doing some more research and I see a few people recommending using regular Cat6/6a enclosed in liquidtite conduit rather than outdoor ethernet - primarily because it's cheaper and easier to terminate. Is outdoor ethernet really that much more difficult than regular ethernet to terminate?

If you haven't terminated them before, its just an extra hassle but completely doable. Tbh, I'd just bury a duct (this can be hydro/water pipe) with a pull rope and pop normal network cable through that. Gives you an option in the future to pop in fibre instead if you ever fancied and even say run an alarm cable out to connect the remote building to a house alarm.

z0oT

danicm wrote: »

In terms of running your cat cable alongside the armoured electrical cable, I'm not an electrician but I would imagine this goes against regulations, I think you need to run them a certain distance apart, to avoid interference from the electrical to the network cable, but also for safety reasons you don't want a possible circuit between the high voltage and the low voltage cables (e.g. someone decides to stick a shovel just where the cables are and end up nipping them both and causing the high volt to be conducted into the low volt cable frying all your equipment or worse).

It really shouldn't be the end of the world to run both alongside each other to be honest.

In ethernet, there are actual transformers either side of the cable that will provide electrical isolation. They're either embedded in the RJ45 jacks (magjacks) or they're separate ICs on the PCB of the router/switch etc. For that reason even a direct short to the mains like you describe would unlikely blow any of the equipment attached to either side of the cable. Of course that is provided the manufacturers of said equipment are using proper specced transformers/magjacks.

Electrical interference that you describe typically would only be an issue on places like the factory floor where you have 3 phase power supplies powering things like motors/welders etc. You're just not going to ever have that level of power in a home setting. Even then, that's what shielded cables (STP) are for.

Still though, having said all of that if it's easy to run a second conduit just for several Cat6 cables, then there's no good reason not to.

Dazzy

ct_roy wrote: »

Doing some more research and I see a few people recommending using regular Cat6/6a enclosed in liquidtite conduit rather than outdoor ethernet - primarily because it's cheaper and easier to terminate. Is outdoor ethernet really that much more difficult than regular ethernet to terminate?

I looked at the liquidtite conduit and from some quick research it seems expensive at €6 a metre whereas armoured/swa cat6 cable that you can bury directly without conduit is about €2.50 a metre.

KeRbDoG

If this just for a network cable of some sort which you want to bury and you wait to avoid buying armoured network cable, I'd just use a standard hydro/water pipe as the duct.