Obviously this varies a great deal, but I’m trying to figure out the cost difference between
A) Structured wiring (using home runs to diff. rooms from a central box in the basement) to supply data, phone, cable, etc. to diff. rooms
B) Ordinary Bell wire for standard 2-line phone jacks throughout, plus coax cables to, say, 3 locations in the house.
This is for new construction–not some expensive refit.
I’ve been seeing numbers like “$1-2/s.f.”, “$2000 for a bare-bones setup, $10,000 for the works,” etc., but I don’t have any clue what the regular costs are.
In other words, $2000 is a big chunk of change, amortized over 30 yrs or not. But if just getting basic old-fashioned telephone and cable service is going to cost me $1500 anyway, it’s not as big a jump.
I knew somebody who wired their own house between the time the framers were done and the wallboard went up. Some builders will allow this - other will not.
I’m in the planning stages of a new house and plan to use “home runs” from each room to a central location on the lower level. This will be for coax and Cat5e cable. I plan to do all this myself, so the cost of cable and boxes is all that’s involved.
Our builder didn’t allow me to install the wiring in my house, but they did allow me to spec it out. I wish they had let me do it. It would have been a lot less expensive, plus I ended up having to rewire all the RJ-45 jacks once I moved in anyway (They were used the USOC rather than EIA 568 convention for the pairs).
I got 14 drops of 4xCat5e + 2xRG6; 2xRG6 to a location I had verified would work for a satelite dish; 2xRG6 to the cable box; and 2xCat5e to the telco box home runned to a location in the garage. I believe I spent about $4000 on the wiring; and over time I’ve been finishing off the wiring cabinet piece by piece on a as needed basis.
For example, I didn’t bother buying patch panels and punching down all the Cat5 cables until DSL was available in my area; and after more than a year I’m only now installing the dish. Now that I do have DSL, I don’t seem to have enough time to watch TV anymore…
To more directly answer your question, I’d need to know the number and kind of drops you’re planning, and what (kind of) equipment you’re planning on having in the wiring closet. There are far too many variables for a $/s.f., or some flat cost for a “bare-bones” or “the works” to be an accurate measure.
Running crappy wiring is perhaps a bit less labor intensive because it’s typically not home runned. But it shouldn’t be much more than an hour for 5+3 drops.
I get both Cat5e and RG6 for about $100 per 1000’. For retrofits, wire bundles containing 2xCat5e and 2xRG6 is often used as it’s easier to run. But at $500/500’, it’s signficantly more expensive. I don’t know how much cheaper Cat3 and RG59 would be. But for 5+3 drops, I can’t imagine it being that much of a savings.
Standard telco and cable wallplates are cheap, but I went with modular connectors which are about $5 per Cat5e module, and $2.50 per F-connector module, plus another $1.50 or so for the wallplate, it adds up. Depending on what you run, I think this may be the most significant price difference outside of whatever equipment you buy to tie it all together at the wiring closet.
At the minimum, I recommend running two Cat5e and one RG6 to every drop. One Cat 5e for computer, the other for telephone(s), and the RG6 for cable/satalite. If you can afford it, run two RG6’s which will allow you to run cable and satelite to a location simultaneously. You won’t necessarily want/need to make it all live at the head end, but you’ll never have a better opportunity to run wires than before the drywall goes up.
The place I contract for as an installer prices it out like this.
4 Structured wiring locations. (Tek Net Outlets)
Tek Net Panel (Thier custom panel, there are lots of others on the market)
All the phone and coax jumpers you need
All locations terminated. (That’s my part.)
$1,780.00 Canadian
Additional Tek Net Outlets are $160 each fully terminated.
Additional phone or cable outlets are $35 fully terminated.
Additional Cat5e locations are $50 fully terminated.
We do several builders as a standard but sometimes a customer with another builder will use us. Typically the builder will credit them $35 for each cable or phone location the builder does not have to run since they are having us do the wiring instead.
I know it seems like a stack of cash to do structured wiring but you’ll be glad you did later on and even later later on when you sell the house.
I wouldn’t suggest using Cat3 or RG59 even if you get it free.
I hope that was helpfull at least for price comparison purposes.