Installing an ethernet outlet
Posted by Wayne
If you read the previous post about the “forearm forklifts”, you’re already aware that I had the good fortune of being given an awesome big screen TV. My father in law wanted to get one of those flat panel screens to hang on his wall instead of having his giant big-screen, so he generously gave it to us.
This rekindled my interest in my barely used XBOX 360. I previously had it hooked up to an okay sized TV, but it wasn’t great. I would really only play the XBOX on rare occasions just because our basement TV room was kind of dreary. The big screen (and awesome surround sound speaker system that came with it) pretty much changed all of this. Now it’s my favorite room in the house.
An awesome thing about the XBOX 360 is that you can connect to the internet and play against people all over the world. Your options are to connect the XBOX directly to your router or buy a $100 wireless attachment for the XBOX so you can connect. I do have a wireless router which is located all the way on the other side of the house, and it does have ports on the back so I could potentially connect directly, but it was so far away that it didn’t think it made sense. I thought that eventually I’d probably break down and buy the wireless attachment
The other night at dinner my friend Mike mentioned how he had just plugged directly in to his router and how easy it was. For some reason that gave the motivation that I needed to do it the potentially cheap (and hard) way rather than buying the wireless attachment. I would run a cable all the way over to the other side of the house to connect my XBOX to the router.
The easy way to run the cable would be to just start drill holes everywhere until I got both “male” ends of the cable where I needed them to be, but I was only going to do it if I could keep everything nice and clean. This morning I went to the Home Depot and started looking at parts to do what I had in mind.
After some quick measurements, I figured out that I needed just about 50 feet of Ethernet cable to get from the router location to the XBOX. I bought a Ethernet jack, old work electrical box, quick connect outlet cover, and an additional 3 feet of ethernet cable. I also stopped by Target to get a 3 month XBOX Live card so I could connect and start getting trash talked by 12 year olds without delay.
My first step was to drill a hole in the floor right in front of the baseboard behind the router on the opposite side of the house. I didn’t want to put any additional holes in the wall at that location because it probably won’t be permanent long-term. Drilling a hole in the floor is easily reversible in the future because the cable would just have to be snipped and pulled down the hole and moved to a new location and the tiny hole itself is covered by carpet. In short, it’s a semi-permanent solution until I am forced to move the router by a baby taking residence in the spare room where the router is currently located.
I pulled back the carpet with my channel lock pliers to expose the floorboard. You don’t want to get too grabby with your hands when dealing with carpet edges because of the sharp little tacks that are pointed straight up underneath. They’re sure to draw blood. Once I had the carpet pulled back, I drilled a small hole right next to the baseboard to feed the wire down below into the unfinished part of the basement.
Once I had the hole drilled in the floor, I snipped off one end of the 50 foot Ethernet cable. Snipping it off allowed me to feed it through a very small hole, and I’d have to snip it off when it got to the final location anyways (keep reading). Once I had it snipped off my wife helped me feed the wire down the hole from above while I moved down to the basement for the next steps.
Once I had all the wire pulled into the basement (leaving enough slack above so it could connect to the router), I went about hanging the wire from the basement ceiling. I hung it using cable staples that secured in place around the cable. I hung the cable in a slightly recessed area above an I-beam that runs the length of the basement because I know this is a spot that I can drywall over later without any issues (because it’s slightly recessed). If I would have just hung the cable from the floor joists above I’d have to remove it later if I want to drywall the ceiling (which I do, eventually).
The final location for the cable is underneath the basement stairs in the unfinished side of the basement. In the photo below, the TV and XBOX are directly on the other side of the wall. Rather than just drilling through the wall so I could have an Ethernet cable at that location, I wanted to make it an actual Ethernet outlet which I could plug in to from the other side. There was an existing telephone outlet on the wall and I decided to remove it and install the Ethernet outlet at that location.
Moving on to the outside of the wall, I removed the existing phone jack and traced the new electrical box on the wall with a pencil. I then cut into the wall with a utility knife along the lines and hit the cut area with a hammer to knock out the drywall.
It took a little extra use of a drywall saw to slightly enlarge the hole, and then the new electrical box fit snugly into place. Because I was using a “old-work” box, once the box was in the hole I tightened the screws which opened up tabs on the backside of the wall and sucked the electrical box securely to the drywall.
Now that I had the electrical outlet box in place, I fed the cable into the box and went to work on the front side reattaching the individual cable wires into the new female outlet.
The Ethernet jack has eight tiny color-coded wire receptacles on its back side for the eight tiny wires of the Ethernet cable, and it came with a small tool for pushing the wires into place. After stripping back the wire casing, there were four sets of twisted wire pairs which I pulled apart and attached into place of the Ethernet jack by color.
Once the wires were all in place, the “quick-connect” jack snapped into place on the outlet cover and the outlet cover was secured to the new electrical box. Now I had a working Ethernet jack right behind my XBOX!
I connected the XBOX to the outlet with the 3 foot Ethernet cord I bought, entered in the code on the back of the XBOX live card, and I was playing games with people around the world. It is awesome! My XBOX came with a headset that connects to the wireless controller so you can hear people saying all sorts of strange things in strange accents while shooting at each other. I think I’ll wait until I get a little better before I start talking back.
Next weekend Mike M., you and I have some business to take care of.
Total cost: $30, Total Time: 1.5 hours.
2 Responses to “Installing an ethernet outlet”
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April 20th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Awesome. I look forward to joining you online for some COD4. Hopefully the 12 year olds won’t make too much fun of us. Add me to your friend’s list - GruntMG.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Thanks for the play-by-play, this is a big help! I’m looking to run an ethernet cable to a external hard drive kept in a safe for data backup. The idea if rewiring the ethernet wires was spooking me but it doesn’t look so bad.