How to Organize a Home Networking Panel By Infinity HD

Hi, this is Justin with Infinity HD. We are
a home theater installation company here in Arizona. Today, I want to talk to you about
a project we did a couple of months ago. This project was a bit of a challenge, mainly because
it involved working with a lot of equipment that our company didnt install.

Our job
was basically to go in and do a bit of housekeeping which is easier said than done. What we encountered
at the job during our first consultation were these 2 massive networking panels. These panels
are very common; they serve as a place to house all the networking, phone and video
cables in your home. Theyre great for keeping wires concealed and organized, but heres
what happens.

Whenever a telephone cable or satellite technician comes in to do an upgrade
or activate a service, theyll just add to it; theyll put in a modem or install
a router or plug in a distribution amp without really removing any old equipment or keeping
the wiring maintained. So, overtime, the panel becomes this very cumbersome and complex mess.
You see in these photos, the wiring is so scattered here, that the client couldnt
even close the panel door. Now this room was their pantry, so every day
they walked in to grab ingredients for breakfast, they had to look at this disaster of wiring.
What they wanted was for this whole thing to be cleaned up, and for any old obsolete
equipment to be removed so that they could have the panel doors close.
We looked it over and came up with a game plan and gave them a quote. We estimated it
would take about 2 full days to complete the re-wiring and this included unplugging all
the wiring, trimming the cables, mounting the hardware and tidying up the panel to try
and make it look as esthetically pleasing as we could.

Now, a big challenge with this
project was there were a lot of components and a lot of service feeds that needed to
be rewired but they were running a business out of their home and they couldnt be offline
for too long or they would lose business and potential revenue. So we had to be careful
with what we were disconnecting and what we needed to keep online.
Now, you can see hanging here is a cable modem for the internet, below that is a telephone
interface, which provides 1 primary voice line and 2 fax lines for the home. The grey
box above that is a network switch which splits the internet feed to multiple locations throughout
the house. The black box in the middle is a doorbell module, and all these rails on
the side here with pins sticking out are part of a telephone splice point which splits the
phone lines to various locations throughout their home.

Here we have the next panel; this
one was mainly for security, automation, and video distribution. You can see a box here
that says channel vision that amplifies the cable service coming in, which in turn feeds
these 2 splitters here that send the cable TV to multiple rooms throughout the house.
It looks here that they have about 16 TV locations. Next theres a big printed circuit board
on the bottom with a lot of wires coming out and thats a HAI security and automation
control board. So this was a bit of a challenge.

Going into this we had to make sure we didnt
short anything out, and didnt interfere with their business, and when we were done,
had to make sure that it all worked the same way it did before we got started. First, we
spent about a half a day just labeling and testing all the wires to see what was being
used and what wasnt. After another half day we got to this point with the first panel.
You can see we tried to make 90 degree angles and bundle the cables as much as we could.
All the components you see, the big difference is that theyre mounted inside the panel
and not just hanging outside spread all over the place. Heres the next panel; we didnt
disconnect all the security cables and redo them, we just bundled them up and tried to
maintain them as best as we could as you can see here.

We used Velcro, Velcro is awesome.
It has 2 sides and you can wrap it around the cables and if you need to make a change
or add something later you can undo the Velcro and add the cable and redo it again; its
really helpful. A lot of companies and a lot of installers will use zip ties but if you
dont have a handful of zip ties around its really hard to make a change to the
system without making a mess of it again. So Velcro is very handy in a situation like
this where you have service providers coming in and making changes to it. Using Velcro
in this project will definitely help to ensure the wires stay maintained for a long time
into the future.

There you can see a picture of the panel before we got started, now you
can see a picture of it finished. You see the router, the dealing box, the cable modem
and the phone interface were all moved to the top and then the cables are concealed.
Both panels were able to be closed. We didnt have any challenges with network or security
wires not working when we got it up and running, so it was a successful project. Its really
all about taking the time paying attention to details and making sure its done right.
Now I had fun on this job, and Im glad we got the opportunity to do it.

This is a
pretty extreme example of a networking panel that needs tidying up. We generally do work
on panels that have a couple dozen cables and usually only takes a couple of hours.
Hopefully this gives you some insight into how you can improve the networking in your
home. Thanks for watching, please subscribe and check out our other projects at infinityhd.Tv
and click on projects. Again, Im Justin with Infinity HD, until next time.
Thanks for watching, please subscribe and check out our other projects at infinityhd.Tv
and click on projects..