[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by DoubleF

I'm always confused by this. How much do you guys think it takes to fish ethernet wires to each room from a utility room? To me, it seems like getting excited about slightly better tires on a brand new car. The cost difference is negligible. Some effort and time savings maybe, but nothing insane AFAIK.

So many people nerd out about pulling lines to rooms in a new build, but AFAIK, it only costs a few thousand dollars max for materials and labour (if you don't fish and terminate it yourself) for basically an entire home. You don't need a new build to do it.

I had Cat 6A pulled into a few rooms in my 1980s home about 2 years ago. It didn't cost much. I paid less than a grand to pay someone to pull it into 5 rooms from the utility room at $20-30 an hour to do it for me (because I'm lazy and I even own equipment to fish wires which probably would cost almost as much as I paid the dude to purchase on my own) AND purchase the cable + terminations/panels etc. I also paid extra to pull line that was at least 10 gbps vs 1 gbps or 300 mbps. I paid $350 in materials including 1000ft of Cat 6A, and what I paid the guy to pull all that line was maybe $400. I also had extra cable and stuff left over in the end. All this and I probably pulled enough line for about 40-50% of my home.

Cost breakdown:

- CAT 6A (10 gbps) 1000 ft spool @ $350 x 2 = $700 (And I'm not even sure you need two spools) assuming each line is on average 50-70 ft long. You could pay $80 for a spool of 5e, but why do that to yourself? Future proof. Cat 6 I believe is $150-200 per 1000 ft and can also do 10 gbps.

- Wall plates, patch panel, crimping tool, jacks etc. $200 total.

- Time: 2-3 hours average per upstairs room. Half that for main floor/basement rooms/media rooms. Adjust time if doing conduit method instead. Pay someone $30-40 an hour to do if you do not want to do yourself = $60-120 average per room?

- Maybe $200-500 to patch up the occasional snafu or open up a hole to help fish cables if needed?

Ball park figure, that's like, $200-300 a room, but if you do multiple rooms and pull a coil of cable, there's an overall time savings maybe?

Well we have a finished basement, so it would be impossible to pull any cable to spots I'd like to install PoE cameras for instance without cutting out drywall