So, we finally had a second phone line put in. I have always taken care of the interior line installation in our homes. Where we used to live they encouraged this and would make sure we knew which wires connected to which.
So, today the phone guy comes. He puts in the second phone line and then does not hook it up to the wires going into the house. That would have been ok but the doohickey (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary) with the screws and the main jack for that line is coded in red/green and of course the second phone line wires are coded in black/yellow. I took a guess and hooked up yellow-green and black-red. It is working, I’m using the computer on it right now.
My question is that if I hooked it up backward will my modem blow up the next time a sales person radomly picks my number to call to give me a prize if only I’ll sit through a 45 minute presentation?
I have had the pleasure of doing basicaly the same thing that you had to do, but my first attempt was less succesful than yours. I had the wires backwards and i just never got a dial tone. I re-did the wires and presto, no problemo. As far as i know, if you had it backwards, it just won’t work, no fireworks or anything else, just nada.
As JBurton pointed out, wiring the phones ‘backwards’ won’t burn the house down or blow a fuse. It just doesn’t work.
The key to inside phone wiring is consistency. It doesn’t matter at all whether you go with yellow/green and black/red OR yellow/red and black/green, IF!!! you wire all the duplex outlets the same. Hey, it’s not as though the different ‘colored’ conductors carry only certain colors of electrons… it’s just copper wire with different colored plastic on it…
It happens that I’ve found a GREAT many uses for 4-conductor telephone cable (that’s ‘two-pair’ in phone geek-speak), including low-watt wiring for extension stereo speakers, alarm systems, and so on. In a pinch, the stuff works OK as a clothesline, too.
I suppose that you could use it to hang a picture too, but speaker wire works fine.
Thank you very much for your explainations. I do understand about the consistency and had everything wired correctly on the inside. OK, then I’m all set because it either works or it doesn’t and mine works.
There are standards out there, and there are a reason for standards.
The main phone wires are always red and green (known as tip and ring in the telco world). If you run a second line through the same cable, it’s black and yellow, but very few people actually do that. Red and green. And if you get a dial tone, but can’t actually dial, you need to swap to green and red.
Go rewire it to red and green. There’s no danger in leaving it the way it is, but someday you’ll have a problem or want another phone or install DSL or whatever, and it won’t work.
For RJ-14 connections (4-conductor phone jacks), the inner pair and the outer pair are what pair up to connect to a phone line. As stated before, these pairs are red/green and black/yellow.
Nowadays, it mostly doesn’t matter if you accidentally connect red to green and vice versa. But it always thus. Ringers on phones used to be heavy current devices. It was important which lead wire was ground and which was not. But now most phones ringers are electronics that use non-polarized capacitors.
If it’s of concern to you, Radio Shack sells little polarity testers for RJ-14 jacks. Green light says correct; red says reversed; and no light says no connection. The even have a switch so you can test both the inner and outer pair of lines at once.