Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Can You Do With Old Coaxial Cable?
Long-time Slashdot reader Theaetetus writes:
I recently bought a house and the previous owner left some coax (mostly RG59) running between rooms for cable distribution. I'm a cord cutter and don't need cable, and I've already run CAT6e everywhere. But before I pull the RG59 out and try to seal the various holes he left, I figured I'd pick Slashdot's brain: can anyone think of a good non-cable use for spare coax lines?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What can you do with old coaxial cable?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What can you do with old coaxial cable?
A dipole is actually 75 ohm, so RG59 works fine as a feed line.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Or re-purpose it for a central TV antenna system.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Here's a primer.
If you don't like how they look, unscrew the wall plate, shove the cable into the wall, and replace the wall plate with a blank one. That's a helluva lot cheaper and less labor-intensive than pulling the cable out.
To begin with, consider the quality of the installation. As others have noted, if what you have is cables run in a crawl space or basement and poking up through holes drilled in the floor by the baseboard, your best bet may be to simply pull it out and seal up the holes. It will be easy to replace if necessary. If you have a properly done system with the cables going into the wall and out through a wall plate, why not keep it? A future owner may like it. You can always put blank plates on the boxes if you find the CATV plates distracting.
Anyway, other possibilities for coax cables:
First, by having coax cables in place, you are already prepared for putting a cable modem anywhere the cable runs. This depends on the house, but if you want to be able to have a central location for a single router (wireless or not), you can put everything together in one spot where it is easy to maintain. For instance, for one of my sisters I found a suitable out-of-the-way spot in the middle of her house where I could have power, cable, ethernet cables, and telephone lines all come together in one spot (she has a VOIP telephone), all together, making it easy to reset anything that needs to be reset without having to go into anyone's bedroom, accessible at any time to anyone who needs to work on it, with a central location for the wifi so one router covers the whole house, etc. This would not work so well if I had simply left the cable modem/router in the corner of the house where the cable comes in.
Second: so, you aren't using the incoming cable for anything - not for cable TV, not for broadband, not for satellite TV - well, do you still have a DVD player or a DVR or something? If you hook this up in a central location, you can just use one for multiple TVs around the house.
Third: I'm not sure what CCTV uses these days, but that might be a possibility if you want to hook up a baby monitor or something.
Finally, as others have said - depending on how this was originally wired, it might be useful to keep the cables in place to pull in something new at a later date. Again, depending on the set up, you might want to leave everything in place, or you might want to cut out a bunch of a rat's nest of wires and just leave sections where it would be difficult to pull in something new.
That might not give you much to work with. The cables themselves are decent signal conductors, but the problem is that there just isn't much in the way of making a good connection to them other than what they were designed for. Otherwise you might be able to repurpose them for anything from a telephone line to a doorbell.
I'd just terminate them properly with wall plates where need be and leave them. Surely you aren't going to live in this house your whole life? As another mentioned, you can set up an OTA TV antenna and use them to run it to your TV.
I wouldn't remove anything, if you sell your house you can take a hit on the sale price for not having it wired properly.
cat7 doesn't really exist as an actual standard. 6a does, and accomplishes the 10g that "7" aimed to accomplish. So no, he shouldn't install "cat7"
Has never built a house.
I've never seen coax put through conduit in a house allowing you to use it as a pull wire. At best, it's snaked through holes drilled through the joists and floor boards. At worst, it's stapled to the joists. Typically, cable fasteners are used.
Any way you slice it, you're not going to be able to pull it.
That being said, if you buy a house with an unfinished basement, do yourself and every future home owner a favor, and run 1/2" EMT or PVC from your basement utility room to every habitable room of your house.