cable management

A

AsadK

n3wb
Jun 10, 2023
22
12
Pennsylvania
I use Cat6 Riser shielded blue cable for my cameras. The cable is stiff, and I got 8 of those coming into a cabinet (or say enclosure) where the NVR is. After all the cables are in the PoE ports, it requires force to push the NVR back to be able to shut the enclosure door. Somebody said that I use patch panel to help ease the strain on ports and connectors. Do you concur with the idea?

I am thinking that if I do use patch panel, it will still need to be connected to the NVR but not sure if it will stay outside or inside the enclosure.

To give you an idea, my enclosure looks like the attached. Mine just doesn't have the side door, it only has the front glass door with metal frame.
 

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AsadK said:
I use Cat6 Riser shielded blue cable for my cameras. The cable is stiff, and I got 8 of those coming into a cabinet (or say enclosure) where the NVR is. After all the cables are in the PoE ports, it requires force to push the NVR back to be able to shut the enclosure door. Somebody said that I use patch panel to help ease the strain on ports and connectors. Do you concur with the idea?

I am thinking that if I do use patch panel, it will still need to be connected to the NVR but not sure if it will stay outside or inside the enclosure.

To give you an idea, my enclosure looks like the attached. Mine just doesn't have the side door, it only has the front glass door with metal frame.
Click to expand...

Hi Asadk

double check the NVR size .. that cabinet looks a little too short imho ..

Personally I prefer a patch panel ..

Trendnet makes a good one imho .. reasonable price, better reviews than monoprice version I looked at :

 
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mat200 said:
Hi Asadk

double check the NVR size .. that cabinet looks a little too short imho ..

Personally I prefer a patch panel ..

Trendnet makes a good one imho .. reasonable price, better reviews than monoprice version I looked at :

Click to expand...

Yes, my cabinet is smaller than the one I attached here. What makes it difficult to work with is that PoE ports are in the back of NVR. Thus all the cables get coiled in the back of the enclosure.
Will the patch panel be installed in the front or back of the enclosure?
 
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Here is my network rack with regular network switches and patch panels, camera network POE switches and patch panels, and the BI PC. Prior to converting to a BI PC I had an NVR sitting on a shelf in the rack.

The home runs from the cameras went to a patch panel.
The ports from the NVR went to another set of ports on the patch panel.
I then patched them together.

You could go ahead and patch all of your NVR ports to the patch panel and not need to pull it out again when you add more cameras. You would just need to patch the home run port to the NVR port.

Network Rack.jpg
 
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AsadK said:
Yes, my cabinet is smaller than the one I attached here. What makes it difficult to work with is that PoE ports are in the back of NVR. Thus all the cables get coiled in the back of the enclosure.
Will the patch panel be installed in the front or back of the enclosure?
Click to expand...

Front @AsadK just like @Ri22o pictured ..
 
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A patch panel also gives you the flexibility to move things around or add an external POE switch later on and more easily plumb it in with your NVR. As you can see with my network rack there are some patch cables that go to random places. Having the patch panels allows me to use any network port in the house for any purpose, I just need to patch it over.

I wanted to test a sky cam and had an unused ethernet run going to the garage. I just patched it from the normal network patch panel to the camera POE switch and was good to go.
 
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Look what I have to keep up with...Jesus.....Now I gotta cancel the motor swap on the Pontoon and dress my shit in at the NVR/POE junction in the Garage...dammit all!
 
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Flintstone61 said:
Look what I have to keep up with...Jesus.....Now I gotta cancel the motor swap on the Pontoon and dress my shit in at the NVR/POE junction in the Garage...dammit all!
Click to expand...
Here is an updated photo.

More cameras have been ran and patched in on the lower POE switches.
I have changed my network strategy to add a segregated subnet for IoT devices. Using patch panels has allowed me to simply add another switch and move items over to the IoT/segregated network as needed. (although I may reverse the logic and move items to the normal network leaving the segregated as the larger portion of the rack)
I also migrated over from my SmartThings hubs to Unifi APs and was able to easily add in that functionality just by patching their POE switch into the network switch.

Patch panels are your friend.

2023-07-05_10-46-42_650.jpeg
 
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Ri22o said:
Here is an updated photo.

More cameras have been ran and patched in on the lower POE switches.
I have changed my network strategy to add a segregated subnet for IoT devices. Using patch panels has allowed me to simply add another switch and move items over to the IoT/segregated network as needed. (although I may reverse the logic and move items to the normal network leaving the segregated as the larger portion of the rack)
I also migrated over from my SmartThings hubs to Unifi APs and was able to easily add in that functionality just by patching their POE switch into the network switch.

Patch panels are your friend.

View attachment 167012
Click to expand...
Correct me if I am wrong. The patch panel will be at front of the enclosure but the NVR PoE ports are in the back of the NVR that will stay in the back of the enclosure. Will I use a foot or 2 feet jumpers to connect patch panel to the NVR?

Is a fan in the enclosure necessary?
 
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AsadK said:
Correct me if I am wrong. The patch panel will be at front of the enclosure but the NVR PoE ports are in the back of the NVR that will stay in the back of the enclosure. Will I use a foot or 2 feet jumpers to connect patch panel to the NVR?

Is a fan in the enclosure necessary?
Click to expand...
Depending on the layout of your rack, you will likely need at least a 3' cable. You always want to make sure to have enough cable to move the piece of equipment for service without needing to unplug it and disrupt the connection.

If you use a patch panel that takes keystones, then you can use an off the shelf patch cable. If you use a patch panel that needs to be punched down, you can still use an off the shelf cable, but just cut the end off that you will be punching down (this is what I do).

My enclosure has a fan but it's not plugged in. I also can't use the front door, so not having that on there is a big help.

This is a punch down style:

This is a keystone style:

This is what you would use for keystones (terminated cables):

This is what you would use for keystones (non-terminated cables):
 
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AsadK said:
Correct me if I am wrong. The patch panel will be at front of the enclosure but the NVR PoE ports are in the back of the NVR that will stay in the back of the enclosure. Will I use a foot or 2 feet jumpers to connect patch panel to the NVR?
Click to expand...

Typically, yes. But you could mount it in the back, if it is more appealing to you (if there is enough clearance).

AsadK said:
Is a fan in the enclosure necessary?
Click to expand...

Fan is optional... how does the cabinet temps feel at this point? Most devices that require a fan, have one built in. Depending on the vents of the enclosure you're using the component fans will displace enough air, in cahoots with nature's thermal properties of heat rising.
 
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AsadK said:
Correct me if I am wrong. The patch panel will be at front of the enclosure but the NVR PoE ports are in the back of the NVR that will stay in the back of the enclosure. Will I use a foot or 2 feet jumpers to connect patch panel to the NVR?

Is a fan in the enclosure necessary?
Click to expand...

If you have a rack that opens up the back, you can put the patch panel to face the back, this way have the PoE ports in the back of the NVR just a short cable away ..

OR

you can turn the NVR with PoE ports around so that you see the back of the NVR in the rack / cabinet .. ( yes, the fan now blows out into your face when you look at it .. )

note, many NVRs are not designed out of the box as rackmountable .. so do double check this.

OR

you get a nice PoE swtich + NVR w/o PoE ports / PC running blue iris that is rackmountable and do that @Ri22o did and have a great looking setup ..
 
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Ri22o said:
The UPS battery was junk and I had a couple AGM batteries laying around. It only made sense. I tried to make my own with an inverter and batteries, but I couldn't get it to work correctly; there was always some lag between power off and inverter coming on.
Click to expand...

I have a regular 850VA UPS hooked up to a 150ah gel battery array. Runs the cameras and NVR for at least two days. Since everything is in the bedroom, we also have the TV and a fan hooked up but only run those if we know it's a short outage. Unfortunately, the UPS can't really give any significant charge to the batteries since it's designed charge a much smaller battery.

Found these on Amazon:


They're cheap enough but like you experienced, they don't have the capacitors to reduce the delay to 6ms (UPS standard delay) and are about 20ms. Too bad as I could hook my car battery charger up to it and it's a much smaller profile than an entire UPS.
 
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CanCuba said:
I have a regular 850VA UPS hooked up to a 150ah gel battery array. Runs the cameras and NVR for at least two days. Since everything is in the bedroom, we also have the TV and a fan hooked up but only run those if we know it's a short outage. Unfortunately, the UPS can't really give any significant charge to the batteries since it's designed charge a much smaller battery.

Found these on Amazon:


They're cheap enough but like you experienced, they don't have the capacitors to reduce the delay to 6ms (UPS standard delay) and are about 20ms. Too bad as I could hook my car battery charger up to it and it's a much smaller profile than an entire UPS.
Click to expand...
Yea, I am sure the batteries recharge at a much slower rate due to size and design.

I had tried a couple different inverters that were supposed to have "instant on/switch" capability, but none of them switched fast enough. I tried a solar charge controller/inverter plugged into a 12v power supply hoping it would work more seamlessly, but it didn't.

 
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Ri22o said:
Yea, I am sure the batteries recharge at a much slower rate due to size and design.

I had tried a couple different inverters that were supposed to have "instant on/switch" capability, but none of them switched fast enough. I tried a solar charge controller/inverter plugged into a 12v power supply hoping it would work more seamlessly, but it didn't.

Click to expand...

If there's an outage of say 15 or 20 minutes, I don't bother hooking up the car charger. It's a bit of a pain in the ass as if I disconnect the battery from the UPS, an alarm goes off. When the batteries ran dead last year when we had the hurricane, it took almost 48 hours to charge the battery array.

I think there's a way to disable the alarm for battery disconnection but I prefer to have it on in case of a loose connection.
 
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