Also, something I see exists now are these “inspection cameras” which are cameras with a long, flexible or semi-flexible scope that could be fished through walls. Are those useful in running wires? Anyone have any experience with them?
They are nice, but not essential. You can poke the scope in and see if there’s a fat pipe or fire blocking in the way, as well as see if there’s anything that needs to be avoided like power cables.
Fishing cables in a finished space can be like a puzzle. Sometimes you can just pop a hole in the bottom plate of a wall from the unfinished basement and be right where you want to be, other times, there’s beams, bricks, heating ducts, whatever, in the way and the easiest path may be wrapping 90% of the way around the house to put wires through open basement space to find a plumbing chase, up to the attic, and back down behind the casing molding of a closet to get where you want.
I know I’m stating the obvious.
But, be very careful in attics. It’s so easy to put a foot or heavy tool through the drywall. I wear kneepads for crawling in tight areas.
I prefer crawlspaces. It’s much cooler and safer. What really sucks is a muddy crawlspace. That shouldn’t happen and the drainage needs to be corrected. Wet crawlspaces can cause mold in the house.
I hadn’t thought about plumbing chases, but it may turn out that’s the easiest way to get into the wall of the laundry room which, as I’ve said, I think is the most sensible place for a patch panel/switch.
Yeah, I’m nervous about the attic. Every other house where I’ve had to get around in the attic has had fiber glass batts, so the joists are exposed. In my new house, it’s blown loose insulation which covers the joists. What are you supposed to do, start brushing it around with a broom?
I crawl and use my hands to feel for the joists. It is harder with blown insulation. But you can still find them.
I made it easier and safer in my attic by wiring several light sockets.
I agree with the OP, wireless compared to hard wired internet is still shat and probably always will be. However, running wire through your house without putting holes in the walls will be pretty tough except for what is over unfinished basement areas. We had the same issues with our house built in 1986 and we just slum it with the wireless.
24"X24"X3/8" plywood. 2 or 3 sheets to spread your weight. Crawl from one to the next and take them up behind you. Unfortunately once you’ve compressed the insulation, it stays compressed. In my newer attic I was able to relatively easily find the joists though I did start with the largest plywood I could get through the access hole. While I was building I ran smurf tube from a box in each room into the attic up to the roof joists. I did not pull wires in until we needed too.
Again, as my OP states, I have an unfinished crawl space under the 1st floor, and an unfinished attic over the 2nd floor.
I’ve been surprised at the replies saying wireless is good enough or will soon catch up. I used to work in IT, and while I haven’t kept up on the fine points since leaving the field, it was my impression that because of the fundamental way that wireless works, latency will always be worse over a wireless network. And while both wireless and wired are always improving, so that today’s wireless is better than yesterday’s wired, and tomorrow’s wireless will be better than today’s wired, at any given point in time, current wireless will always be worse than current wired.
But I still need to find the joists first. I don’t want to plop a piece of plywood down then wind up putting weight on one end which is not resting on a joist, and teeter-totter through the ceiling.
ETA: also as my OP implies, I’m willing to pay somebody else to do this as long as I can feel reasonably certain they’ll do a good job.
If you are willing to pay, then do the wiring yourself, cut drywall where you need to, and pay a drywall worker to patch the mess you may make. There are quite a few videos on YouTube that show tricks to pulling wire that will minimize the drywall that you may need to cut.
Why would I do that? To me, the wiring is the hard part. If I were going to split up the tasks, I’d pay someone else to spend hours crawling around in the dirt in the crawlspace and fiberglass insulation in the attic. I can patch drywall, sand, and paint myself.
Ok, I am just the opposite way. Guess it was the years as a kid working with my dad who was an electrician. I think you can handle this yourself with a bit of planning and determining the cable routing. Do you have a studfinder? Some of them can also locate pipe and 120 volt wiring, so you can know what you are getting into.
I don’t have a stud finder, but I am planning on buying one, and don’t mind spending extra money on one with fancy features if those will help.
Have you actually been in the house and tested it yet? Regardless of how you wire your house, you’re going to need rock solid wifi for your portable devices anyway. Modern WiFi shouldn’t add more than 2 - 3ms of latency to your connection and if your WiFi speeds are greater than your internet speeds, then the only time you cap out is when transferring large files between computers.
Unless you’re planning to do VR surgery in your house or you’re one of the top 100 FPS gamers in the world, I doubt you could find much perceptual difference between your wired and wireless connections providing you set up your WiFi properly.
My instinct would be to first set up your WiFi network and diagnose any problems with that first and if you really feel like you can’t live without a wired connection, only then investigate how to install it.
Every place I’ve ever tried online gaming over wifi, the lag has been intolerable, so much so as to make the game unplayable.
Please, people, this thread is about how to wire my house for wifi, not whether I should do so.
I take it the house is already built. (This is 100 times easier if you do it just after it’s framed.)
I second this. We had an alarm system installed and they guys were magicians. It took about three days but there is no sign of drilling or patching. They ran wiring from the basement to an upstairs bedroom, front door, kitchen back door, door into the garage. I didn’t watch them do it but it was a top-notch job. Electricians can probably do it but I’ll bet they would be more expensive, and you don’t need an electrician because you are not dealing with household current.
It won’t increase your home’s value regardless. This is one of those things you do just because that’s the way you want it.
Yeah, but unless you’re going to re-pull cables every few years, then you should be comparing future wireless against current wired at some point.
That said, there are some things that wireless is probably just never* going to be good enough to handle, like fast-twitch internet gaming. The extra latency is going to kill you, and it’s always going to be there, and the required throughput is going to increase as network technology increases, so playing late-model games online is going to require hardwired network for the foreseeable future.
*for values of never <= 20 years.
In case anyone’s wondering what “smurf tube” is, it’s a common nickname for flexible plastic conduit that happens to be bright blue, although, for low-voltage stuff like network or cable TV wiring, there is an orange variety. What makes it useful is the ability to easily add or change the cabling in the future. Run Cat6 now, and five years from now, it would be a piece of cake to change it to fiber.
I will third the call for a local commercial fire alarm / security alarm people. If you don’t want to do this yourself, after all. Anybody that does CCTV might be a good fit as well. When I was a life safety engineer, I worked for a fire alarm company and we got called to do ethernet/data drops all the time in historical buildings where you can’t expose the wiring. Fire alarm wiring is the same way - it has to be in a wall or in conduit.
If you do it yourself, I would recommend going to a security/low voltage supply company and tell them you want a glow-rod set. These are special, fairly cheap tools that help you fish wires through walls, and through the fire breaks that are put into walls. Its totally doable.
I have a 150 megabit Comcast Business connection at home. All devices in the house are on WiFi. I run my gaming PC on a $13 USB 802.11ac Dual Band 2.4GHz/5GHz Wireless Network Adapter and I get 80megabit on downloads, gaming pings are in the 10-20ms range, I play lots of online games like Battlefield 1 and have no lag problems at all. My housemate plays action games like Apex Legends on PS4 and has no complaints. WiFi with the right router is pretty good now. I will say that I live in an area with no other houses around though, so interference is not an issue.