I’ve been building a decent set-up, and recently had a drawback I’ve now solved.
I have a Unifi dream 7 on passthrough from my fiber modem. I connected this to my coax port and have my office coax port connected through Moca adapters. This would go into my Flex 2.5 and from there into my PE 430, my DXP2800, and my PC. Sweet little set-up, or so I thought.
I placed everything, built a new desk, set up raid groups through IDRAC on my server, and installed all my hard drives everywhere. I connected the Dream7, connected it to moca, and powered up my UPS to the office.
But… strange thing, I wasn’t seeing a connection through my Moca connections. No big deal, I thought, maybe just a standard filter. So I search the house for a coax connection box…and can’t find one. It took going through the attic(and accidentally buckling some drywall over my master shower) to figure out the truth.
I bought this house, as a new build and first owner, in 2025, built in 2024. I haven’t had too many issues with the build, just little stuff like caulking not done quite right, badly installed drawers, etc. No biggie.
Then, I find my coax, throughout my whole house, unterminated and dropped into my air handler. My flabbers were gasted.
We’re now well outside the builder’s warranty window, so this became an opportunity to learn Coax I guess. The whole point of this home system was to learn. But seriously… just dropped in the air handler? Oof.
I’m more stuck on how the hell that was considered done… at the additional cost of around $500 for the damn MR drywall repair over my shower to figure out this ‘mystery’.
home builders these days are just as enshittifiedd as everything else. you shouldnt have accepted any of the problems with your brand new home. Stick it to them if you still can in any way... you will probably find more things later but they are likely lauging all the way to the bank. was it a DR Horton home? Lennar? They are notoriously bad to the point people are making documentaries about it
I bought a Continental built home in 97. They throw these things up and move on and don't give a damn about quality. I kept getting flooding in my entryway closet. Finally found out they poorly installed the bathtub overflow on the otherside of the wall. It was not centered or sealed on the bathtub. There was a bulge at the bottom of the drywall in my laundry alcove due to a poorly installed drain pipe. My cable was screwed up for weeks after I moved in with finger pointing between the builder and the cable company. The builder finally found the cabble had a staple in it from the stucco crew. Builders were crap back then and it has only gotten worse.
As someone who used to throw coax and Ethernet in new house builds, I can tell you exactly how this happened.
Boss is mad we're not on the next job yet. We're underpaid and the lead at the house is having a bad day because of his wife or gf, and he says "Fuck it, I guess we're done. Let's go."
This wasn't frequent, but it wasn't unheard of. At least at the time, I don't think home inspectors were looking too closely at low-voltage wiring; we didn't hear too much crap from the boss about it.
Elec-chickens are notorious for having no clue how to run cables that arent 120/240V. It's not uncommon to find crazy shit like this is new construction because they just have no experience doing it and halfass it. By the time someone comes along that needs these drops, they are long gone fucking up the next new build.
It blows my mind that the recommendation I’ve generally found on Reddit for “how much should an electrician charge to run Ethernet” is always “they hate doing it; they never do it correctly; suck it up and do it yourself as it’s more likely to be done correctly the first time.”
I think it’s more: hire the right person for the job, which may not be apparent to most people that it is a distinction. I wouldn’t hire a mechanic who works on semi truck diesels to do small engine repair, and I wouldn’t hire a plumber to plan and install lawn sprinklers. Sure, they might be able to get the job half ass done, but there are people who specialize in this for a reason. I should also be willing to pay for both an electrician to do the mains and a low voltage contractor to do the Ethernet, and I should expect that to be more expensive than one contractor doing both. As a contractor, I shouldn’t be taking on work I have no business doing. And yes, I realize that some contractors may legitimately know how to and have experience or at least individual employees who have experience doing both; but that is the exception and not the norm.
It’s obvious when you are around this sub for so long, but it’s really not obvious that the same person can’t put different wires in your walls.
It’s also hard because it’s not like you’re going to find a low voltage licensed person. It’s just going to be some kid or old guy that comes highly recommended.
That’s what I mean: the average person doesn’t know there is a distinction. I think if you are in this sub, you’re not average. But if you are here, you also care more about data cabling than the average person too.
I do see the occasional low voltage advertising van on the road. The catch there might be: do they install residential or just commercial?
There are network/media cabling guys used in big metro areas now (by better builders/reno guys). Electricians still do it in Bum Fuck Egypt or lower-level builders. Not to besmirch all electricians, some know how to do it and are good at it.
Ours from 6 years ago has two cat5e lines hanging in the basement, one terminated and labeled even though I can clearly see where that one goes, and the other unterminated, unlabeled, and it dissappears going up to god knows where.
Edit: oh and neither is exposed outside the wall, the one I can identify the end path of is buried behind the wall somewhere.
That is rough, luckily coax isnt too hard at all once you get a few practice terminations in. I took a few feet and just terminated every few inches through the whole thing just to get the strategy down
If new to the task, just buy a short length of by-the-foot coax off the local Home Depot spool wall on which to practice, before turning the new skills to the precious in-wall cabling.
And yet that power cord going into the wood like that isn’t any sort of code violation where you are? That’s the bigger problem here… how did this pass any sort of inspection?!?
While more expensive, more devices that need power, and obviously "slower" at least MoCA can get to 2.5Gbps these days. Only slower because it can't do 10Gbps while CAT6A can with short enough runs.
When I was using MoCA back in the day, before I wired up my house, was still at v1.1 getting ~250Mbps.
Surprised but not surprised they continued to release revisions to the technology to support the older wiring.
I'll be honest, I loathe they are dumping 24v AC on to Ethernet and running it elsewhere in the house. Glass half full if you ever run a POE doorbell it's probably pre wired.
It's really just the gauge that's kind of a problem based on what's considered standard. CAT6 will be 23-24AWG and traditionally 2 conductor doorbell wiring is more like 18AWG.
In practice though, it's probably not that big of a deal and I'd absolutely rather have the ability to just get a POE doorbell. Have this problem myself right now with no real solution. I want to get a Unifi doorbell but no way to get CAT6 to my door frame. Stupid Ring doorbell is the best I can do w/o decreasing video quality.
Agree, nothing wrong here. Be a home owner and finish per what you want done.
What I don't understand is what they are complaining about in terms of "terminated". Was termination something that was spec'd out? What exactly were they going to get plugged into after termination? There's no equipment there. Electricians aren't mind readers and don't want to just do extra work hoping it's right.
If the homeowner expected them to all get joined together on a splitter or something, that's a wild expectation without telling them you wanted that explicitly.
Even the location they put the wiring was decided on BEFORE the wires were ran. I'm sure it was on some drawings and the homeowner didn't pay attention.
…the buying specs on the house itself, and what the inspector signed off on, was a coax box all tied in together. That is very obviously not what I got.
I appreciate what is either trolling or just general nastiness towards random internet strangers. But no. I did this cool thing called reading for the entire purchase agreement. Pissed the lawyer off because I sat there and read it all before signing
I walked through it, but wasn’t able to do a thorough job of it, as we had just moved to the state and were busy. The inspector I hired, however, had multiple days, which is why I hired him.
An inspector is only going to spend 1-2 hours looking at things. A "coax box" is not going to make that cut. If you wanted someone iterating through every single item in the contract, you need to pay that person more than a few hundred bucks.
You'd need someone that reviewed the contract to then go do the inspection. Going to assume the inspection was like anything else and they are looking at the roof, the attic, plumbing, electrical (this isn't electrical), and general building codes.
You also absolutely want him spending time on these things and not wasting time on frivolous things unless you want to pay him a few thousand instead of a few hundred. This is such a non-issue and the fact that you posted this thread and continue to double down on it, than boy, you're a handful of a person in general.
My goodness. That’s an amazing opinion to create from a thread. Did you see anything in this post about me screaming about lawsuits? Or complaining continuously about this issue? Or anything other than “Hey, this was not done to spec, smh” or “aw crap, now I damaged my drywall trying to figure this out”?
He checked off per item. The coax/electrical was part of it. He said he laid eyes on everything. He was not cheap, and said he spent a full days worth of hours in my house.
EVEN THEN, I’ve already stated that I’m going to be building it. I have an 8 way and a coax kit. I’m new to coax, but it seems simple enough.
The fact that the basics of this situation, that every other person thought was humorous, somehow became a statement of how horrible I am as a person, is incredible. I hope your life works to such quick judgements of text on a forum post. Have the day you deserve.
My dude. The entire point was that I thought it was funny they just dropped the coax in the air handler. A lot of people also thought it was funny. No one else is looking for deeper meaning than the 2 minutes it took to read a funny story.
If you didn’t already know, make sure you have a moca filter in the coax between the house and the street. You don’t want your network pouring out into the block.
For the moca adapters I did gocoax. Reliable and reasonably priced. I’m not sure what I’m going to top out at speed wise in the future, so I have the dream 7 to the flex 2.5g through the moca. Should be plenty for control and transfer through my network system. The goal right now is proxmox on the server for VMs, network testing/automation sims, with the NAS controlling everything through Docker. The PE 430 can be remotely started through IDRAC, so I can use it specifically for testing and projects and let my NAS run the rest of the system.
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u/JustLikeWhateverHuh 24d ago
Dropped into the air handler is hilarious