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OK, time for another "first" -- I need to securely mount the conduit to the concrete wall. The original builder used nails that were kind of pointy rectangles, about 1.5mm wide. Should I just go out to Home Depot and buy a box of reasonable-looking concrete nails of comparable size, or are there...

Now that my living room is half-denuded of drywall, and I'm seriously contemplating ripping off the other half and rebuilding the wall 3/4" further from the concrete, it occurred to me that one wire-routing possibility I'd previously written off as un-doable would actually become viable if I...

Suppose you have two or more outlets wired in parallel along a single circuit, with the boxes fed sequentially by a single supply that enters one side, and exits the other. Does the NEC have any particular requirement that those outlets, though wired in parallel, must be physically laid out in...

Does anybody know where I can get shallow (1.25" or less from front surface to rear surface) electrical boxes... ideally, ones that at least respect the spirit and intent of NEC, if not its absolute letter? Here's my problem: the wall is a party wall. As far as I can tell, it looks like the...

Well, I just finished cutting a hole in the drywall where my first new outlet is going to go, and made a discovery... I'm not yet sure whether it's cause for celebration (I don't need to run a new set of power lines after all) or agony (thick metal pipe, small hole, general home-improvement...

I'm finally rewiring the living room. I'm going to be removing the lower 3 inches of drywall behind the old baseboards, installing Wiretracks at the top of the cavity, and running power cables at the bottom, before mounting the new 5-1/2" baseboard to the wiretracks. It's the closest I can get...

Does anybody make in-wall power outlets designed for a "normal" single-gang or double-gang box that arrange the outlets themselves in alternative configurations to maximize their real-world usefulness in a world full of wall warts? For example... * Single-gang, 3 outlets, Decora-style surround...

Do M1G rules have access to variables, and are timestamps something that can be stored as a variable & queried by a later rule as "number of (milli-)seconds between ${timestamp-in-variable} and ${now}"? Can I set "timer events" to fire in the future? For example, 500ms from now, 1 second from...

Has anyone ever tried cutting a Philips FineLine phone cord: If you did, were the wires too thin/delicate to strip and ultimately connect to something else (say, by wrapping them around a screw terminal, securing them to an Elk quick-connect block, crimping them with a B(?) connector, etc? I...

Well, I just made an interesting discovery. My M1KP keypad (id=1) works from both keypad locations I've wired (with or without termination jumper, doesn't seem to matter), but my M1KP2 keypad (id=2, set by holding key while powering up and manually setting id) doesn't work from either location...

Does anybody remember seeing X-10 switches somewhere that looked like "normal" toggle-type wall switches at first glance, but were actually in a "middle" position and could be flipped up (on) or down (off) with a satisfying tactile snap? I have a few X10 dimmer-type switches I've bought that...

Last night I attempted to wire up the two keypads for my alarm. The following wire segments were involved: m1g: keypad bus on m1g start: cat5e cable ~15 feet long running between the M1G and seg3 seg3: the in-wall phone wiring between my computer room (where the m1g temporarily sits) and master...

A couple of nights ago, I wired up the keypad (the one with temp sensor) along with the speaker and a magnetic sensor to my M1G, enrolled the keypad, ignored zones 2-16, and tested it out... it worked. Last night, I wired up the second keypad (the flushmount blue-backlit one), and tried...

I'm still mulling over the best way to get rock-solid ethernet connectivity between my computer room (upstairs, front of house) and laundry room (downstairs, rear of house, with composite steel-pan + concrete suspended slab in between). Here are the options I've come up with so far: * HomePlug...

Are the devices now marketed as "gaming routers" really the product that in the ancient past was known as a "wireless ethernet bridge"? In other words, if I buy something with the words "gaming router" on the package at Best Buy or Circuit City, can I feel reasonably confident that I can plug...

OK, I've now come almost full circle. My original plan (before I got physical possession of my new house and found out what horrors actually await behind the walls) was to bore holes for 4 conduits between the first and second floors, and run wires for everything behind the drywall. Then I found...

While reading through my new M1GSYS4's installation guide, I got the impression that each keypad (well, the original, and 'KP2 at least) can ALSO serve as a mini input/output expander, and host an additional input and output... above and beyond the 16 that can be connected directly to the M1G's...

Has anybody ever tried using D'versibit to drill through 3/4" furring strips between a concrete party wall and drywall? I bought their starter kit with 3/8" bit, but haven't had a chance to try it yet & wanted to get others' feedback while I can still return it. I have the 3/8" bit with 54"...

Today at Home Depot, I noticed that the Leviton ports that allow you to connect 2 cat5 pairs to the back of a S-video interface only cost about $9 each. Ditto, for a pair of RCA jacks for line-level stereo audio. How well do they actually work? Are they baluns? The cheapest s-video-via-cat5...

I've seen a few posts here and elsewhere that imply that a M1G used on a phone line with DSL needs some special kind of filter or interface, allegedly because it needs to be able to seize the line, and that it's not adequate to simply use normal DSL filters between the alarm controller and...