Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House Technology Cost Savings

[Tim Mensch (tim-coho-l]

Robert Heinich wrote:
> Does anyone have a ball park figure on the cost of installation?  Also what 
> post installation concerns should I look into?
>   
How are phone/cable lines run now? There's a good chance they're already 
being run using CAT-5 if your community is at all recent--and if they're 
all going through a central panel that you have access to, then you're 
golden, since you can use two pairs out of each CAT-5 cable to send 
Ethernet to each unit. Just put your Internet router and switch at that 
location and send a line to each unit.

That's similar to how the last segment of Ethernet makes it into 
individual units at PHCH--after we get it to the building, we just 
connect to the already-wired jacks in each unit. The digging of cables 
was just for getting the connection to each building. The router lives 
in the common house, though, and only a switch lives at each building.

If you don't have a community volunteer with the appropriate experience 
to run cables or punch them into existing boxes, then, well, it tends to 
be quite expensive to hire--and the best place to get a ballpark would 
be from a local installer. It's not really that difficult if you have 
anyone with reasonable dexterity with hand tools, good attention to 
detail, and the ability to follow instructions--as long as you have good 
instructions and the right tools, I suppose. :) There's also the 
possibility of a hybrid model: If you have the expertise to put down 
cable and plastic conduit, but not the wiring parts, you could try to 
find someone to work with to just do the last part.

Tim

--
Tim Mensch

Currently in Pleasant Hill Cohousing (CA): phch.org

Member of Tumblerock, a Boulder, CO area community
in its forming stages: http://tumblerock.org