Cat6 for motion sensors, door sensors, siren?

[amaaffy]

Thank you all for your helpful input.

 

[apostolakisl]

Just my 2 cents here, I used cat5e for my motion sensors and siren. Everything else is alarm wire. The cat5 works fine. On the siren I put all the solids together and the stripes together, but it probably wasn't necessary, I just wasn't using the wire for anything else so what the heck. And speakers got speaker wire.

 

[signal15]

I ran cat-6 for EVERYTHING, except for door strikes as they take a bit of power. I'm using 23ga cat-6, and I paid $77 per 1000ft. I'm pretty sure alarm wire costs more than that. I got it from monoprice.com, but I think it's gone up a bit in price.

I figure I can double (or triple, quadruple) pairs if I need to, but I haven't yet. I have glass breaks, door sensors, motions, smoke relay, speakers, etc. I have not installed the door strikes yet, but as I said, I did run larger gauge wire for those.

As far as the wires taking up more room... I have a separate wall cabinet with a 300-pair 110 block in it where I punched down everything. When wires need to go to the elk or somewhere else, I patch them with less bulky wire. This gives me the ability to use the cat-6 down the road for high speed data if I need to, or a number of other things. It's internally shielded (from the twist) and makes excellent speaker wire, video wire, or carrier for data other than ethernet (such as HDMI, HD-baseT, or serial protocols).

Yes, it's harder to work with, and if you're punching things down you need to learn a few things. But, I think it's the most future-proof wire you can put in, and it's very flexible in the different things you can use it for.

 

[Del91574]

You can generally buy aa 1M put up of 22/4 for 1/2 the cost of an equivalent CAT cable. 4X for a 22/2. I wouldn't advise people to run it for speakers, alarm components, etc. It's one thing about running an SLC or Eschelon/Lonworks network, but not worth it overall in a standard alarm.

Also, highly doubtful the majority of installs have the cable installed properly to maintain the cable integrity....I've tried shooting many with scopes and pentascanners/verifiers to be able to point out each staple or where the wire was pulled/pinched/crushed.

 

[signal15]

You can generally buy aa 1M put up of 22/4 for 1/2 the cost of an equivalent CAT cable. 4X for a 22/2. I wouldn't advise people to run it for speakers, alarm components, etc. It's one thing about running an SLC or Eschelon/Lonworks network, but not worth it overall in a standard alarm.

Also, highly doubtful the majority of installs have the cable installed properly to maintain the cable integrity....I've tried shooting many with scopes and pentascanners/verifiers to be able to point out each staple or where the wire was pulled/pinched/crushed.

I didn't check to see what the price difference was between Cat-6 and 22/4. However, I figured at 70-some dollars for 1000 feet, the difference would not be much overall (it's up to $109 now though). And, it gives me the ability to run ethernet to a lot more locations if I need to do so in the future. I also liked the idea of using 110 blocks for termination and patching.