Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic".
Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."
You should not be surprised. A lot of us are DIYers, and see no need to pay someone to do something we can do ourselves. Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs. There is zero reason to pay someone to do it.
I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house, but I suppose they have different values than I so live and let live...
> Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs.
Except the whole point of his post was that he didn't know how to do it competently, there's no way he wants to enter the crawlspace, so has resorted to wacky workarounds.
So, no, it clearly isn't within the skill (or desire) of anyone, but many would rather resort to hackery and hubris rather than pay someone to do it correctly.
I'll counter that and say there's probably minimum wage coders in India who write equal or better code than you at 1/10th of the pay, certainly possible as they have two functioning hands.
I generally feel the same way having spent a lot of my childhood on a farm, but when I started adding up the cost of all the random tools I would buy (now that I can’t skip out to a barn with 50 years of accumulated tools) to complete a task, and the time for the multiple Home Depot runs/missed steps I’ve started to realize it’s easier and cheaper (in some cases) to have someone else do it. Though there are still some tasks I can’t help doing myself just because I enjoy the challenge, catharsis, or I just want done properly.
> I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house
I realized that it is cheaper for me to pay someone do some things than doing them myself. Instead, I can either work or do something fun or more interesting.
I think that's the key point really. For someone with even a mild interest in this stuff, the task of running ethernet cables is very approachable and feasible. At that point the time spent on it is a plus instead of a minus, and paying someone else is no longer competitive.
Well... I retrofitted a whole UK house with Cat6A, about 20 runs, longest run about 25m. The walls were dot and dab construction so quite a bit harder than drywall, but a lot easier than solid. I had my electrician brother to help for a weekend to do the cable runs. It was an entire two solid days of work just to do the runs, and this is with someone with the right tools and experience plus me having already planned it carefully. It would have taken me a week to do it alone. After that it was a full week of evenings terminating everything at both ends and another couple of weekends filling a repairing the walls. Definitely not for the faint hearted!
You are not a professional at everything and you don't know what you don't know so things that seem easy might not be and in fact could have significant dangers. A person that does the thing every week is going to be efficient and knowledgeable. It also creates jobs and supports the economy. A lot of strong independent types are frugal and arrogant and self centered to the point of being a miser.
A place I used to live had structured cabling built in and half of it was CCA. I could tell immediately when I cut the cable to terminate it just by seeing the silver ends. It even said CCA on the casing so wasn't even fake.
Electricians are definitely better than you at running cable and knowing where to cut the holes. But make sure you choose the cable and terminate it yourself.
I work with several low-voltage guys on different jobs, both new development and retrofit. It is exceedingly difficult to find good cable guys. Running parallel to romex, staples through the middle of the cable, minimum radius as a non-existent concept... Like you say, the competency is the hard part to find.
And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.
Almost all homeowners can't pay more than commercial jobs (for the same amount of billable work).
Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs.
Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)
It correlated exactly with Covid. And the folks I’m talking about are the same folks pre-covid. They didn’t retire, they’ve lost their minds, very noticeably increasing in particular over the last 3 years.
This fall is part of a steady escalation.
It appears to be heavily correlated with the insane propaganda floating around too.
>Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."
You'd have to pay me that kind of money (amortized) to deal with vetting/hiring/managing/scheduling/QC'ing someone else and their work.
Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."