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Cat 5e cable outside?

I'd run it in round conduit (keep the rodents off if nothing else) and you should probably go with cat 6 for better future proofing. I forget but it's good to about 50 m length, I think. At least if there's a fault then you could probably pull fresh cable through...
 
I used internal grade with no trunking etc. 3 years later it's untouched by rodents and weather. As I had to buy the whole reel and it was cheap I'm quite happy replacing after 5 years or so
 
I'm what the electricians call a low voltage weinie -translation-I run data cabling ,alarm wiring, cameras ,door lock wiring -all low voltage . At least here in the USA outdoor wire rated for that use will be labeled direct burial (and yes you can bury it) -oddly enough this means that the outer jacket will also be sunlight/UV resistant. It is also likely to be filled with a semi-liquid around the actual conductors (messy to terminate) . I'd contact the local electricians or companies that advertise they do network installation and see if you can buy a generious amount from them. Remember : no right angle bends (my Dad always said we wanted Marilyn Monroe curves) and maintain good distance from all power wiring -500mm at a min. .
 
Guy who rehabbed our house was a first class carpenter , drywaller and painter and completely utterly incompetent when it came to any type of wiring. Comment from electrician who was trouble shooting the shocks I was getting handling BX cable :"ah -see this a lot -guy was color blind when it came to black and white." Dry electrician humor . Since this home had been used as offices for a decade or more -every room had two or three RJ-45 network jacks installed -great-except - first hint of incompetence -the jacks are installed so the patch cord release tabs are up (convenient -folks like/want this) . Problem is the copper contact fingers are now at the bottom of the jack -gravity will do a good job of adding dust/pet hair ,etc.on top of the contacts - this house had sat empty of 2 or 3 years. Next I'm tossing empty boxes into the attic and notice he's used the same holes in the rafters that has has run power cabling thru to run his CAT-5. I hate ,loath and despise intermittent problems (one of the reasons I don't use Wi-Fi .) -so fairly quickly I was forced to re-route and rewire and replace all the jacks with CAAT-6. End of problems.
 
Yea, you can get all kinds of electrical interference from mains into your cat5 so best stay clear.

On some installations I have done I've seen internal cable laid outside & has looked very much worse the wear. It becomes very brittle & the outer sheathing breaks down and frays. However I do not know how many years it took to get that way. Always avoid water traps outside, that includes poking holes in enclosures for the cable to pop in & out if need be. Normally a great place for (horrible) spiders to reside if they can find a way in.
 
Just be aware that if you use external graded Cat5 it's an absolute pig to terminate and not very flexible over short distances.
 
An installer put a long run of the black CAT5 around the outside of our house (it's a long house!) as the Router was front of house and the TV/HiFi is at the opposite end. The ethernet plug used to terminate it is quite a chunky item and can be tricky to extract once it's plugged in. Another related problem - we got a posh new Samsung TV this week, our first in 15 years. This TV has input sockets for HDMI, Optical, USB etc built into the back panel of a skinny screen with a side entry to facilitate wall mounting. My chunky ethernet plug simply wouldn't go in so I had to gently remove the outer rubber case from the plug in order to gain entry. All done now so a sigh of relief.
 
Can you elaborate on the reason for the outdoor cable? If it's to bridge buildings, e.g. house to outbuilding or shed then I'd avoid creating an additional electrical connection between them. Whenever I've had to do this in the past we've always used LC fibre and switches with SFP+ connectors. All of which are readily available and cheap nowadays.
 
I've been doing low voltage wiring for a little over 60 years -network wiring for maybe 30 years . Early on -went thru a two day training course on how to terminate and locate fiber optic cable.Have run a lot of CAT-5 ,5e and 6 -but so far not a inch of fiber optic cable. Admittedly I mostly work alone or with one helper -so large jobs aren't something I'm looking for or get. I have learned to my sorrow that when specing buried cable - I have to be on site to observe the job as it's happening-electricians are capable of running a 200 amp service in a trench with a direct burial CAAT-5e laying right next to it or low voltage alarm wiring or camera leads in the same trench and running for 150 feet in close proximity Apparently the electrician's standard is you won't get a shock -so it's OK??.
 
MJS said:
Whenever I've had to do this in the past we've always used LC fibre and switches with SFP+ connectors. All of which are readily available and cheap nowadays.
Click to expand...

Was about to suggest the same thing.

edit: and I'd suggest running a pair of fibre cables for redundancy just in case. You don't have to spend much on a switch for it to support LACP.
 
per-Sony-fied said:
I might ask the reasoning behind this. Cat 5 is good for long runs
Click to expand...
Cat 6 is good for 100m at 1 Gbps
It is not recommended between buildings due to what a lightning surge will do to the end points.
Decent Ethernet SPDs are not cheap and don't work that well either
Fibre just works
 
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per-Sony-fied said:
I might ask the reasoning behind this. Cat 5 is good for long runs
Click to expand...
Galvanic isolation, in other words a potential difference can exist between the two buildings resulting in current flowing down the cat5 cable. Not to mention lightning strikes.


Pete
 
I ran a Cat5 link from my loft down to the lounge. For the majority of the run it's in a drain pipe from the roof then out the side at the bottom and through the wall into the lounge. Been there 20 years and the little bit of exposed cable shows no sign of wear.
 
Am having a VM engineer in to change my landline over to VOIP next Tuesday (and really annoyed about doing this 3 years before necessary). My router/computer is upstairs, my DECT phone base station downstairs and that's how it needs to remain. I suppose he'll run cable outside (easy route) from hub to phone socket and I wonder, reading the above, if he'll be using CAT5 or 6. The distance is around 6 metres and mostly well above ground.

Is my supposition right, as this stuff is beyond me and I don't want compromises by VM?
 
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