Wiring my house for Network! Yet another thread!

[sda]

Mount it above the MCB box?

Mount it to the left if there's room, or mount it on the adjoining wall.

Per the NEC, you need working space around your electrical panel for service. The electrical panel needs to be in a space approx 30" wide x 36" deep (from the wall) x 78" high. No permanently installed "stuff" can intrude into the space and it shouldn't be used for storage either. The NEC code is 110.26.

Scenario: If you mount your enclosure in the working space and at a later date have some electrical work done that gets inspected, you'll probably have to move your enclosure.

 

[wuench]

Mounting around that box probably won't work because I am betting you have power wires going in the top (I am assuming that is an electrical panel, not sure what MCB means). The enclosures are design to fit in a 16" stud cavity, I would go to the left (if you have no wires there and bigger is better go witht the 42"). And Ideally I would try to stay 1 stud bay away from the HV panel (you may find wires on the side cavities as well). Also when you do open the wall, make sure you run power to the LV enclosure, and you may also want a LV conduit if you plan on ever doing power monitoring (i.e. Brultech, etc).

I am not sure that that 42" enclosure you linked to has standard holes or not, they look a little funky to me. It just looks low-quality. Some manufactures have non-standard hole layouts to force you to use all of their modules. I would stick with Elk, Leviton, or Channel Vision. I personally like the Leviton the best, they cost more but they are higher quality than Elk. Channel Vision also makes a 50"....

If I were you I would just open up the wall and see what your options are....

 

[tmbrown97]

:hesaid:

Elk, Leviton, Chanel Vision - all great cans. Channel Vision has the 50" with a cool looking smoked glass door that sticks out a little and has a place to mount a fan for air circulation which can be handy.

Also previously you mentioned wanting to know what's in the walls - inspection cameras have become completely affordable lately - I even got this cheap Harbor Freight one about a year ago and it's pretty handy: http://www.harborfreight.com/digital-inspection-camera-67979.html

 

[wuench]

I think this year I am going to dress as a piece of drywall for Halloween.... may not scare the kids, but guaranteed to scare the adults...

 

[drvnbysound]

Oh! that sounds so much like me! :icon_pai:

You forgot another big one, computers and maintaining all the servers in the house.

I spend most of my time *building* stuff that I never have the time to sit down and watch and and enjoy it.

Ah! but the satisfaction of building it and the family using it without any issues ..... priceless !!

Did someone say they were working on computers??? This is what my 'office' looks like this morning:

 

[activemind]

Did someone say they were working on computers??? This is what my 'office' looks like this morning:

Nice! I NEED to show this to my wife to prove that I am not the ONLY one, there are other people like me on this planet earth :icon_pai:

Her standard quote is "Why dont I see anybody else around us have so many PCs in the house!" :angry2:

 

[activemind]

Mounting around that box probably won't work because I am betting you have power wires going in the top (I am assuming that is an electrical panel, not sure what MCB means). The enclosures are design to fit in a 16" stud cavity, I would go to the left (if you have no wires there and bigger is better go witht the 42"). And Ideally I would try to stay 1 stud bay away from the HV panel (you may find wires on the side cavities as well). Also when you do open the wall, make sure you run power to the LV enclosure, and you may also want a LV conduit if you plan on ever doing power monitoring (i.e. Brultech, etc).

I am not sure that that 42" enclosure you linked to has standard holes or not, they look a little funky to me. It just looks low-quality. Some manufactures have non-standard hole layouts to force you to use all of their modules. I would stick with Elk, Leviton, or Channel Vision. I personally like the Leviton the best, they cost more but they are higher quality than Elk. Channel Vision also makes a 50"....

If I were you I would just open up the wall and see what your options are....

MCB in my self created terminolgy means "Multiple Circuit Breaker", after reading your comment I went to Wikipedia and found I was pretty close

MCB - Miniature Circuit Breaker < 100A

I think you are right, there are HV wires on the top. And if I want to leave that much space between the wall and the MCB panel, then I dont think I have the space to go left. Also, based on what everybody is recomending 42" not 28", I dont think I can go on top.

So I am not left with any options on this wall.

I can do the other side, the one next to the Furnace and Water heater (refer to the hand drawn floor plan )

I dont want to do it on the adjoining wall (next to MCB) beacause I want that to be my work area. Its a nice cavity in the garage which can easily take a work bench and some other stuff and I can work even when the cars are parked!

I am not sure I follow your comment on LV conduit! Can you elaborate please.

Okay, ruled out Suttle. I think I will just go with Leviton in that case. drvnbysound also used Leviton and thats what I have seen other members too. Done!

 

[activemind]

:hesaid:

Elk, Leviton, Chanel Vision - all great cans. Channel Vision has the 50" with a cool looking smoked glass door that sticks out a little and has a place to mount a fan for air circulation which can be handy.

Also previously you mentioned wanting to know what's in the walls - inspection cameras have become completely affordable lately - I even got this cheap Harbor Freight one about a year ago and it's pretty handy: http://www.harborfre...mera-67979.html

Interesting that the Channel Vision has a fan mount. With the router, cable modem and a couple of Gig and in future a POE switch, I think a fan would come in handy.

Let me look at the camera, I might go ahead and order it if I like it, but wont come in handy right now. I am too impatient to wait now.

Been planning for a week now, time to punch some holes now :lol:

 

[drvnbysound]

Nice! I NEED to show this to my wife to prove that I am not the ONLY one, there are other people like me on this planet earth :icon_pai:

Her standard quote is "Why dont I see anybody else around us have so many PCs in the house!" :angry2:

Haha! The one in the desk is obviously my standard workhorse for web browsing, picture editing, etc. The one closest to it is my SageTV server. Since it Sage it still pretty new to me I have been making various changes and like to do them directly on the machine - it will eventually be moved to my utility room near my structured wiring panels.

The computer on the far left is actually not mine; I built it for a friend a while back, but it's currently having some issues such as intermittent BSOD's. Trying to diagnose the issue, but it hasn't been a fun process. I have reformatted the HDD a few times and have even replaced it with another one at one point - the issue was still there. Finally I decided to move the RAM (2 x 2GB sticks) to the other open slots (the MOBO has 4 total). This seemed to had fixed the problem. I let the owner know that it seemed to be fixed, but there were issues with schedule and illness and I've had it for a few months now. A few days ago I was asked about it again, and decided that I would be able to deliver it this morning... So I decided to fire it up last night, to find that the problem was back - UGH!! This time, I pulled the RAM and replaced it with one stick from another PC. It worked fine, so I moved it through each of the RAM slots... all working fine without issue. So I started to assume that maybe one of the 2 original sticks was bad. So this morning I have used each stick individually in each RAM slot, and cannot recreate the issue. I now have both sticks installed again, and it's still working fine... back to where I was a few months ago when it was working fine... but I'm not necessarily confident that the issue has been resolved.

I actually pulled in the computer closest to the camera (phone) just for kicks. I had some spare parts lying around a few months ago and didn't want to trash them. So I ordered a matching case and a few of the parts that I didn't have already, and assembled what may end up being used as my CCTV or CQC server - it has yet to be powered on...

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

drvnbysound:

http://www.memtest.org/

 

[drvnbysound]

BSR: I did some Google searching earlier, and found the recommendation of this as well as just using the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool (Windows 7). I decided to do the latter. I performed the Windows test while each stick (individually) was installed in every RAM slot; 2 sticks of 2GB RAM, and 4 RAM slots, for a total of 8 tests. All tests found no errors. That's when I decided to put both sticks back into the machine, and it's currently working fine. I performed the test again, with both sticks installed - again no issues were found. That said, it's currently in the exact same state (hardware wise) as it was last night when I turned it on for the first time in a couple of months. Last night it wouldn't sit in the Windows environment for more than a couple of minutes before getting a BSOD. Basically, all I did was remove the RAM and re-seat it.

That said, I am going to go ahead and DL and test with memtest as well and see if that results in anything different than the Windows utility. Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[tmbrown97]

You guys with computers all over the house must not pay the same rates I do for power - each computer is about $40/month to have on here!

 

[wuench]

By LV conduit, I meant a conduit going between your breaker box and LV enclosure, if you ever had plans do energy monitoring where you mount CT's in your breaker box and monitor how much power circuits are using, trigger events for things like the washer or dryer shut off, etc. Brultech is one vendor. I was just saying while you had the wall open, cover as many bases as possible...

 

[drvnbysound]

You guys with computers all over the house must not pay the same rates I do for power - each computer is about $40/month to have on here!

I don't have a Kill-A-Watt to test - I have thought about buying one, just haven't worried about it much yet. My power bill for last month was $155 (highest has been $218 in Sept. of 2009). It's within my budget, so I really don't worry about it... :-/

 

[activemind]

You guys with computers all over the house must not pay the same rates I do for power - each computer is about $40/month to have on here!

Why have it on all the time. Configure WOL and each client to run the WOL script in background when woken up. Every HDD spindown after 15 mins of inactivity. You will be amazed how much you can save by just doing these on your media server. Dektop/Workhorse PC, different story altogether.