Best Practices for running data conduits through basement [closed]

Question

I'm a new homeowner, having recently moved into a 1920's house. I'd like to run Ethernet conduits throughout the house. The basement runs the full length of the house and its ceiling already hosts electrical and plumbing infrastructure. I should be able to go straight up from there without having to drill horizontally through any studs. I'm relatively well read on pulling and terminating the cables themselves and don't think I need any advice there.

My current plan is for one conduit to run up from the basement to a wiring closet / server room for the connection to the ISP, and then several conduits down from there and into each of the rooms I want to connect.

I'm looking for recommendations for these parts of the process:

• What materials and parts (i.e. junction boxes, wall panels) to use for this process
• How to lay out the conduits
• How to secure the conduits to the inside of my walls and the basement ceiling
• What tools I'll need for all of this
• Where to keep service loops, since I don't think a standard wall receptacle will allow compliant turn radii for solid core cabling.
• Anything else major that I may not know I don't know!

Answer 1

One more important point: Even with a high-quality tool made for the purpose, getting a good connection from wire to a crimp-on RJ45 plug can be difficult to achieve by hand. It is much simpler to use punch-down connections. For home use that usually means using a punch-down jack on both ends of the wire, and then connecting to the switch or router using a short commercially-made Cat5 or Cat6 jumper cable.

You can get panels that hold a row of punchdown-attached jacks neatly and manage the cable coming into them. But since I wasn't concerned about making it pretty or packing a huge number of connections into my network corner, I just used cheap 2-jack baseboard housings, lining them up on a convenient board and labelling them to keep things vaguely organized.

Answer 2

Service loops would most conveniently live in the wiring closet, or else somewhere in the basement.

ENT (smurf tube) is a relatively good choice of conduit type for ease of installation. If you want to get fancy and waste money you could try to track down orange, but blue works just fine and can be had at most home centers off-the-shelf. If you have greater than average concern for rodent teeth, FMC works otherwise similarly for greater cost. EMT also works well, but takes a bit more tooling and learning to install correctly. Hardware is the same as using the conduits for normal electrical use, other than the option existing to use low-voltage rings rather than junction boxes. But you can use junction boxes if you'd prefer to.

If you want to run multiple conduits with assigned directions, you can. Stock pro approach is run one big conduit where you have things going up and down to one location, and then break that out to individual conduits where they are going different places (in a suitable junction box, or not, depending on how much you want your LV conduits which don't need junction boxes all buttoned up where going between different conduits. Again, rodents may influence this choice.)

If your "wiring closet/server room" has aspirations, the cables would just come out of a LV pass through plate, spin around for a service loop Velcro-ed® to the wall or on the top or bottom of the rack, and then be terminated into a rack mount patch panel in your rack. If it's more pedestrian a 12-port keystone wall-plate in a 2-gang box or LV ring will do. If you want to hide your service loops you can put them between the studs and use a 2-gang LV ring, rather than a 2-gang box (LV cables don't require an actual box.)

At the other end, 2, 4, or 6 port keystone plates on 1-gang boxes or LV rings are normal. You can blank any unused keystones.