I’ve turned down friends that own casino’s and friends that “simply” want me to wire their houses. I set realistic expectations. 
That wasn’t meant as a jab… In one of my previous occupations they type of cable was just as important as the type of filters in our RF generators… Cables and connectors can and do make a major impact on the performance of a system.
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Oh no doubt! I deal with fiber mostly, very much the same thing. But when it comes to a home, meh, anything will suffice, as long as you know how to crimp/punch properly.
6e doesn’t exist, some companies started labeling it 6e arbitrarily but there is no such standard, there is however, 6a but for the most part it’s not necessary.
@toomuch unless you get an amazing deal for 5e over 6 (not 6a), just get Cat6 and make sure it’s UNshielded (UTP) and not shielded (STP), not properly terminating STP (which most people don’t) is far worse than just running UTP.
Dude!!! There is nothing more boring in the world than polishing those damn connectors!!!
Fusion splicers FTW! I was trained on epoxy and polish though, yup, sucks bad.
Also, since this is now a conversation on Ethernet, be aware cat6 is thicker and less flexible. If you plan on tacking to a floorboard, or more importantly BEHIND a floor board, going around corners, etc, cat5e will be much more friendly to you. And don’t just staple the stuff down with the 'ol T45, use plastic cable staples, so it doesn’t crush or pinch the cable.
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I was trained by the Navy! Got my civilian and military certs and then did everything I could do avoid the crap!!! lol
But, back on topic…
Yes, standard Cat 5/6 in a house is perfect.
Kitco in Virginia Beach, one of two civilians in my class.
Imagine that… trained by the same folks. Did you go to their facility or were you over at the school house on NOB?
Uh, big brick building, can’t remember what it really looked like, this was like 15 years ago lol. They had a training room laid out like fiber on a sub with bulkheads and some other crap I vaguely recall.
Yeah, I went through the class on the Aviation side back in 2003. Sounds like you were over at the surface side.
So I woke up this morning in my bedroom and decided to connect to my 2.4ghz on my Moca extender and my dl and upload speeds were 50/50! I noticed when I am settled in the room, doors closed, etc, my speeds are fine on 2.4 but if I walk in and close the door and run speed tests, they aren’t. It could be the fact I’m switching between my main access point and my Moca extender and they process isn’t as smooth? Thought that was interesting.
Make sure your ssid’s and security settings are exactly identical. Consumer grade wifi devices tend to suck at roaming. Sometimes it’s better to use a different ssid and set the device to switch to the strongest signal more aggressively.
The keyfobs work for me, but phone presence using ST is patchy and I don’t always want to carry the fob. I’ve worked around it using Tasker and Sharptools. Tasker’s location settings are more reliable, so I trigger Sharp Tools setting mode to “Away” when Tasker says I’m away and vice versa.
I appreciate this only works if you’re only interesting in a single presence rather than running routines based on “everyone leaves” with multiple presence sensors.
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So I’ve been playing around with our phones a bit and found something in the location settings I had not seen before. In the Google Location History under Settings>Location>Google Location History (Samsung S5), there is an option to turn on Location History for my device. As soon as I did this, my presence both going home and away got much better. I also notice that keeping my wifi on helped a lot as well. Not sure if this just causes the phones to push a location update more often or what, but it helped either way so I’m happier.
Between midnight and 1 AM often, the presence FOB arrives and leaves every few minutes…and only does it once in awhile. Have a big zigbee mesh (i think) of a lot of smartthings and iris plugs (repeaters), with lots of consumers: ge link lights, ST motion detectors (and iris, PEQ, etc), Iris key pads, 40 ST/Iris/PEQ contact sensors, and other items…and all generally hums along.
Its the plugs that need to be most reliably close to the exits you say, correct?
To test, I have my presence detector sits next to a plug at night and still does the come and go shimmy, and the hub is directly above it. Hard to imagine much interference from there to here…
Going by phone right now has 90% success rate using SmartAlarm to set sirens, and to then inform SHM to arm and disarm, and using the Iris keypad to disable the alarm via SmartAlarm and SHM if it goes off on arrival and we enter house too soon. Trying to improve presence detection seems to be the hardest thing, and the fobs make sense to me versus the phones which are notoriously off.
Tad frustrated with arrival sensors, but so close. That’s what makes it frustrating.
Does anyone know if minimote in the car (zwave) would connect back to the network quick enough so I can have button 1: arm/disarm, button 2: close/open small garage, button 3: close/open big garage if we clicked the buttons from the arriving vehicle?
a weird thing started happening when a routine would trigger at sunrise for no good reason that also unlocked the door. There was no link in any of my routines to rely on sunrise for anything. I ended up deleting and recreating the routine and its now fine. But I could see what happened in the logs and that it coincidently happened at sunrise each morning.