How To Wire Your Home Entertainment System With Cat 5e

You have just got a new LED TV and a home entertainment system

. It's quite natural for you to want to enjoy the 5.1 surround sound, but your fun is marred by the unsightly wires running across your floor to the back of the room. That is why you need cat 5e cabling for your home entertainment system.

Cabling with a Cat 5e can really help you get rid of pools of cable on your floor or the nest of wires behind your audio/video cabinet. When it comes to AV wire management, choosing the right cable for your home is often a major concern- Cat 5e or Cat 6? Both the cables are suited in their own right, but Cat 5e should be your choice if budget is your concern and Cat 5e can also be used to connect the A/V source components in your home theater, to other rooms in the house. Not only that, CAT-5e cabling is effective for connecting home theater to your computer LAN and through this LAN to the Internet. MP3 servers, PVRs and other audio setups that play internet radio stations of MP3 files in your own computers, come with CAT-5e connectors.

Now on to Cat 5e cabling- if you are coming down from the attic, then you need to drill through the top plate by tying a nut to a strong string. While drilling you need to be careful and drill between the studs. To know how far you have drilled in the wall, you must mark one-foot divisions on the string beforehand. Then you must tape the cables to the string and you need to snag the string by using a hooked piece of stiff wire.

Keep in mind that the Cat 5e cable may seem a bit stiff to go through the hole, if you are drilling from below. This problem does not arise in the case of a junction box installation as the hole would be larger. It is advised that in order to guide the wire through the hole smoothly, you make the initial pull with a 20- or 22-gauge solid-core wire. The sneak trip is to use a professional fishing rod, if you have one!

The next step is to wrap a thin wire around the cable and make a running splice. To prevent the wire from snagging on the holes, you must cover it with electrical tape, and then hoist the cable up using a thin wire. All this is when you are working from below, but in case you are working from the attic, follow the same drill with the exception of attaching the string to the cable instead of the thin wire.

If you want to do an up and over wiring job, as in if you want a wire from the basement to the second floor, then use closets. Yes, closets are your answer and they are usually built one on top of another. Just get a green signal from everyone owning the closets on each floor, and run a Cat 5e from floor to ceiling in the corner of each closet.

Another option and probably the right way of doing things is to install a plastic conduit. A conduit is

a safe option for passing multiple wires and you can always add more cables later. For your home entertainment system, a one inch PVC conduit will do. You can use several short pieces for your purpose. You can save yourself from all this drilling and pulling by taking the exterior route. In other words, take your cable up an exterior wall. Post the cabling and the painting of the house, a cable becomes literally invisible.

A word of caution here, you must take up the cabling job only if you have some experience, other wise you must hire a professional network cable termination engineer for the job.

by: Mike Belletty

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