Well, work on chez-lucwarm continues.
The next issue:
The previous occupant of our house was a “day trader,” and installed a total mess of phone lines, phone jacks, and other stuff.
Unfortunately, it seems he did a pretty lousy job - I managed to get only one line working, and there is serious static.
Who could I hire to straighten up? An electrician? The phone company? How hard would it be to do myself?
As always, thanks in advance . . .
This may be the time to get friendly with the local Radio Shack. They have the wiring and connectors and maybe some advice. The normal little phone connector is called RJ-11 and holds 4 wires. The two in the middle are red/green and are the primary line. The two on the outside are yellow/black are are unused unless you have two phone numbers.
The phone company won’t fix your problem for free. If money isn’t a problem, many places can do a good job since phone wiring is not difficult and is very standard. Whether to do it yourself; well, you can hardly make it any worse. If you really screw it up, you can find help in the yellow pages.
You might try buying the phone company’s inside line insurance and then calling them to come fix it. I don’t know if that’s against the rules, though.
Radio Shack also used to sell a book about phone wiring.
You might want to check into it.
lucwarm wrote:
One thing to remember is that there are phone lines, and then there are phone wires. In most people’s homes, there is only one working line, which is connected to a bunch of jacks. One would assume that the previous occupant had his service cut off or switched to his new home, so you should only have one working line. Can I assume you mean you only have one working jack in your entire house?
The easiest thing to do, if you want to DIY, is to disconnect everything from everything else (even disconnecting the jacks from the wires inside the walls), and then reconnect things one at a time, starting with the jack closest to where the phone wires come into the house from the outside. Oh, before you disconnect that working phone jack, note the color of the wires in the walls which it’s connected to. Write it down. It’s probably the only “live” pair in the house, so you’ll want to reconnect all of your jacks to it.
Anyway, reconnecting one piece at a time will let you narrow down or even eliminate the static problem.
lucwarm:
DAVW is on the right track. Disconnect and reconnect one at a time. Even if the working phone line is connected correctly, other lines might be causing the static on it.
Start at the service box. This is not a new home, so you may or may not have a box on the outside of the house.
If you do, it’s grey, about 10 inches square, and has two “doors” on it. The left one is marked for you to open. Unscrew the Phillips screw and you’ll see some wires and jacks.
The feed can consist of a number of wire sets, starting with four pairs.
white-blue/blue - line1
white-orange/orange- - line2
white-green/green line 3
white-brown/brown - line4
I’m assuming you only have one phone line now. There should be a plug in the jack for the white-blue/blue pair. This should go to some kind of junction box inside the house. In an installation without an outside service box, this will be where the service enters the house. You would see your white-blue/blue feed here.
In a new installation, wires from all phone jacks would also meet here.
Like this:
Junction
box
|Feed|======jack1
|…|======jack2
|…|======jack3
|____|
However, most older homes will have had phone jacks added from one to the other.
Like this:
Feed-------jack1------jack2------jack3
All green/red pairs from the jacks should connect here to the white-blue/blue pair from the feed. Green (tip) goes to white-blue. Red (ring) goes to blue. This is where you want to disconnect and reconnect one at a time. Connect one green/red set, go around the house with a working phone, and see what works and is non-static. If you get static on some and not others, open each wall jack on this string and see what’s connected there. Disconnect and reconnect, keeping only non-static connections. Do this until all lines at the junction box are done. Then go to the wall jacks still causing trouble and the one feeding it. Open them up and see what’s up. At each wall jack, only the green/red pair should be used. Just leave the black/yellow pair unconnected.
If you want a second line, you follow the same procedure with the white-orange/orange feed and use the black to white-orange (tip) and yellow to orange (ring) to each jack on which you want the second line.
As you fix one problem, test all jacks which you tested and were working before, as you may fix one thing and introduce a problem on another.