And I don’t even have a T-Bird for “Daddy” to take away. . .
So, our Third World County™ “baling wire and chewing gum” telco has decided to enter the late 20th Century and extend fiber to the house. Sound cool? Notsomuch.
Let me ‘splain. [pause] No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Fiber to the house means no more power over telco lines (no copper to carry it), and telco line power, or a substitute, is needed for POTS.
So, substitute is. . . a required outdoor power outlet where the telco line enters.
The current location for the telco line is. . . suboptimal, for several reasons. (One reason? Since the fiber line was run in at the street, they’d have to trench around 3/4 of the house to get to the current entrance. Another? The line into the house from the original construction sucks dead bunnies through a straw and needs replacing anyway. There are others.) So, I offered ’em a place on the South wall of the garage for placement of the new box and entry to the house.
But. No interior POTS wiring there. No electrical circuit with a line to that wall.
In attic:
- run Cat5e (since I have scads of the stuff) from Network closet to South wall of garage and effect an exit to the location for new box.
- sever the power to the light in the garage (NOT the line to the light switch!) and install a junction box with a line paying down the South wall of the garage (encased in non-conductive protective material–reasons below)
- install an exterior, weatherproof outlet/box.
Not such a trouble, but. . .
Yeh, it was.
The garage was originally a carport, as I understand (makes sense from the construction). South wall of garage construction:
Brick shirtwaist between three concrete columns; above that, ordinary stick wall (w/ typical drywall) that was added between the brick shirtwaist and the STEEL BEAM that ties the columns together. So. . . no drilling a hole and fishing cable/wiring through the wall, no.
Then. . . the original wood siding was covered over about 30 years ago with vinyl siding (with styrofoam insulating sheets between the vinyl and the wood siding).
Ugly (and not entirely safe) cable/wiring routing, hence need to cover. Weird layers of materials to penetrate to route wiring/cabling to exterior. Lots of exercise with a ¾” auger bit in a manual brace&bit setup. Destroying as little vinyl siding as possible (temps hovering around freezing, so the stuff’s pretty brittle), using a caulk/sealant that barely works at these temps, repairing drywall, installing a new grounding rod for the system–some semi-techie reasons why I prefer local grounding for the outlet to supplement to circuit grounding: all these and more made for fun, fun, fun.
And THAT’S the short version. *heh*
Just glad I had most of the tools and materials on hand, and wasn’t out much on what I didn’t have, because we don’t use our phone line for anything that fiber would improve (voice only) and I’m SURE the phone company, besides using MY power, now, will end up raising my rate for basic POTS service.
Oh, well. Part of the price one pays for living in an otherwise ideal Third World County™.
Oh, it’s nice to have decent POTS wiring in the house now. AND, when the guys come by to trench for the line to the house, I got ’em to commit to hauling off a bunch of yard waste–I made sure it was right in the route from the street to the new box ;-)– and put the fence back afterwards. *heh* So, at least I’ll have something for the telco’s use of my electricity.