Wiring Help Needed

[strin]

Re: Wiring Help Needed

Hi apologies if this is covering old ground, but I have a related question.

I've got 2 lines coming into the house (on a single cable) - one is my home telephone line, the other my work ADSL/telephone. I've run 2xCat5e cable to all rooms (internet & phone), except my study where I've run four (2 x internet, home phone, work phone).

Reading the above chain, and also referring to the following URL: http://www.wppltd.demon.co.uk/WPP/Wi...telephone.html
I decided to use a patch panel for the home line distribution, but to run a direct connection over a single cat5e cable for the work phone line. Have not installed patch panel yet, thought I would start with the work line......

When I removed the faceplate on the ADSL box, I could only find 2 wires (black & green). So, I used the above URL to work out how to attach a BT plug to the end of a cat5e cable instead of wiring direct to the faceplate.

Unfortunately, the colours of my cable differed slightly - instead of BLUE/White, WHITE/Blue, ORANGE/White, WHITE/Orange, I found BLUE, BLUE/White, ORANGE, ORANGE/White (have ignored the other twisted pairs).

If you look at the BT plug with the contacts uppermost, I wired it from left to right as follows:

BLUE/White, ORANGE/White, ORANGE, BLUE

which was my best guess at matching the right hand plug in the following:


Admittedly, I think I only need BLUE/White, ORANGE, BLUE, but included the fourth wire in pin 4 to ensure spacing between the others in pins 2,3,5.

It appears to work, but when the phone rings, it is a constant ring without any breaks - voice & sound work fine, as do outgoing calls. Is my additional wire the problem, or have I got my wires crossed (sorry, couldn't resist it!)?

As you can see, I'm a newbie to this......so thanks in advance for any pointers!

[katman]

Re: Wiring Help Needed

When I removed the faceplate on the ADSL box, I could only find 2 wires (black & green). So, I used the above URL to work out how to attach a BT plug to the end of a cat5e cable instead of wiring direct to the faceplate.

Did you remove the entire faceplate ?

The only time you wuld normally see a Green/Black pair is if you were looking directly at the second pair in the incoming dropwire (or underground cable.)

You should only remove the lower part of the NTE5 which will have punchdown terminals that you can connect your CAT5 cable to.

Unfortunately, the colours of my cable differed slightly - instead of BLUE/White, WHITE/Blue, ORANGE/White, WHITE/Orange, I found BLUE, BLUE/White, ORANGE, ORANGE/White (have ignored the other twisted pairs).

Same thing, just cheap cable. Solid colours are cheaper to manufacture than bi-coloured wire. When I started with BT in 1976 the standard colour code was vastly different.

SKIP THE NEXT BIT TO AVOID HISTORY LESSON ON COLOUR CODES 8O

4 wire was Blue, Orange, Green, Brown and nothing was actually paired.

Anything greater than 4 conductors was in pairs that consisted of a coloured wire and a WHITE. The entire colour scheme consisted of 7 colours Blue, Orange, Green, Brown, Slate, White and occasionally a black.

The colour sequence for a 41 wire cable was

Blue/White
Orange/White
Green/White
Brown/White
Slate/White
BlueWhite/White
BlueOrange/White
BlueGreen/White
BlueBrown/White
BlueSlate/White
OrangeWhite/White
OrangeGreen/White
OrangeBrown/White
OrangeSlate/White
GreenWhite/White
GreenBrown/White
GreenSlate/White
BrownWhite/White
BrownSlate/White
SlateWhite/White
....and a lone black conductor.

The cable was sort of "twisted pair" but instead of a number of "twists per inch", it was more a case of number of "inches per twist" and you often had to strip about 2 feet of sheath to correctly identify the pairs at which pint you promptly applied some tight twists near the butt of the cable to keep the pairs straight.

Needless to say, there were numerous times when the cable accidently "exploded" into a bunch of 41 individual wires and trying to identify which of the 20 white wires belonged to which coloured wire was a very time consuming task.

Thankfully the new colour codes are much nicer.

The "B" wire of a pair is always either Blue, Orange, Green, Brown or Slate with the tracer being the same colour as its associated "A" wire.

The "A" wire of a pair is always either White, Red, Black, Yellow or Violet
("Watneys Red Barrel YUK! Vomit") with the tracer being the colour of the associated "B" wire so there a 25 different colour combinations for 25 pairs.

In cables larger than 25 pairs, the first 25 pairs have a blue spiral tape wrapped round them, the second 25 pairs an orange tape etc.

END OF HISTORY LESSON :-)

If you look at the BT plug with the contacts uppermost, I wired it from left to right as follows:

BLUE/White, ORANGE/White, ORANGE, BLUE

which was my best guess at matching the right hand plug in the following:

Admittedly, I think I only need BLUE/White, ORANGE, BLUE, but included the fourth wire in pin 4 to ensure spacing between the others in pins 2,3,5.

Which would be correct as Pin 1 is nearest the Tag

Whenever you see a picture of a plug 431A you can safely ignore almost ANY diagram showing cord colours as there are sooooo many variations. Originally the colours would have been the old BT cord colours of

2 Red
3 Blue
4 Green
5 White

But I have seen cords using the
1. US colours of Black, Red, Green, Yellow
2. A single red and three whites (like ribbon cable has a red tracer)
3. All 4 wires the same colour but the orientation is defined by flat and curved profiles of the sheath

It appears to work, but when the phone rings, it is a constant ring without any breaks - voice & sound work fine, as do outgoing calls. Is my additional wire the problem, or have I got my wires crossed (sorry, couldn't resist it!)?

As you can see, I'm a newbie to this......so thanks in advance for any pointers!

The additional wire wont be a problem because it isnt actually connected to anything, crossed wires tends to lead to phones ringing constantly whenever the handset is on the hook and the line being permanently engaged.

Sounds like one of the wires is shorted to earth somewhere.

Is it OK if you unplug your wiring and just plug a phone into the incoming linebox, if so, test for earths or voltages on your wiring. If not, then there is a fault on the line so report it (with your stuff disconnected so that it can be tested properly).

I would strongly recomend that you wire to the removeable faceplate as a plug 431A is not really designed to crimp successfully to solid cable.

Hope that helps

Keith

https://www.diyha.co.uk

https://www.kat5.tv

[strin]

Thanks Keith - BT Master socket checked out fine when I plugged the phone directly in, and having looked closer I found where to wire the Cat5e cable directly to the faceplate - and I still have the same problem.....so looks like my cable is the problem . Can't run a new one - so guess the lesson is to test the cables before sealing the walls / putting the floorboards back down! Only other solution I guess is to re-wire the plugs using other (non-standard) colours from the same cable?

Anyway, thanks for the pointers!

[katman]

Thanks Keith - BT Master socket checked out fine when I plugged the phone directly in, and having looked closer I found where to wire the Cat5e cable directly to the faceplate - and I still have the same problem.....so looks like my cable is the problem . Can't run a new one - so guess the lesson is to test the cables before sealing the walls / putting the floorboards back down! Only other solution I guess is to re-wire the plugs using other (non-standard) colours from the same cable?

Anyway, thanks for the pointers!

I would suggest usig the Green pair as a replacement for the Blue pair and the Brown pair to replace the Orange pair.

Regards

Keith