Cat 6

I have a Cat 6 socket on the floor of my office. But for months I’ve been using a cable lying on the floor, running to the router. Why? The guy who installed the sockets left a big coil of wire outside on the ground, connected to the system, and lighting strikes about three times an hour here, and at some point, a bolt of lightning managed to shoot current up that coil and into the house. It fried a good deal of cable, including the bit between my router and socket.

I thought I was going to have to go under the house to run the cable and use some kind of special tool to connect the ends, but I decided to try to fish the cable and open the connectors. I taped fishing line to one end of the old cable, pulled it through both holes in the floor, discarded the cable, saved the connectors, and hooked the new cable to them. It turns out you don’t need any special tools for these connectors. They even have helpful decals showing you which color wire goes where.

I am now blogging without a giant cable running through the room. And I didn’t have to call a guy to come out here and charge way too much for a one-hour job.

Tools used:

Klein flat screwdriver
Stanley needlenose pliers, small
Stanley diagonal cutters
flashlight
50# test
duct tape

Knowing how to tie fishing knots is very useful for this kind of thing.

I left maybe ten feet of slack under the house, and I’m going to leave the fish line in place. I am all done letting other people route ethernet stuff.

Those Stanley tools aren’t great, but they’re too good to throw out and replace.