To conduit or not to conduit, that is the question...

[smoothie]

I would like to clean up the wiring at my house. The majority of the cable will be CAT5e with five RG6 for my DirecTV feeds. Currently all of the camera and TV cables are strung haphazardly on the outside of my home. I am going to make the garage my central hub for wiring and have a good plan to reach directly into the attic. Once in the attic I can easily exit under the eaves and run cable to all the locations I want them. The question is should I put in the extra time, money and effort to run conduit first?. None of the cables will be within reach of a person without some kind of ladder. They will be largely protected from the elements by virtue of being under the eaves.

On the one hand I like the additional protection afforded by the conduit and the ability to paint it without consideration to the cables inside, not to mention the clean sleek finished look of conduit.

On the other hand adding the conduit will add considerable time and some expense as I have never worked with conduit before.

I think I would need to use conduit up to 1" in diameter on the exterior since there will be runs with 15 CAT5E cables and 1 RG6 cable needing to be inside it. One the interior from the garage to the attic looks to need a 2" as it will contain 44x CAT5e cables and 4x RG6 cables. Is it better to have multiple conduits run in parallel and so be able to work exclusively with 0.5" or would I be better off using various sizes of conduit as needed, there would be a junction box each time cables were removed from the bundle.

The 40% fill rule doesn't apply to low voltage cables such as I am running.

I am assuming I would need to ground this conduit.

The conduit I was thinking of using is standard EMT like you would buy at any hardware store for surface mounting electrical boxes and such.

I am leaning towards the conduit, I guess I just want peoples opinions on if it is worth it or not ?

Thanks.

 

[nayr]

I love EMT Conduit, the PVC stuff is only good for underground.. use metal above, get some benders and oh the things you'll make..

misc things ive made out of bent conduit:
- Bug Zapper Hanger
- Mini-Green House Frame
- Canoe Outriggers
- Shade Canopy
- Solar Panel Stand
- Roof Rack Extensions

not to mention other things, I painted a bit to match my walls and strapped it behind a large fish tank.. put privacy film on the back side, now all the pluming/electrical is invisible even though you can make out the color of the wall behind it.

oh and you can use it for putting wires inside of too!!

 

[smoothie]

@nayr thanks for the recommendation. As a fan of EMT do you think I would do better running multiple small or a single large conduit ?

 

[nayr]

depends on whats inside, if you use good cabling you can fit all the signal/data cables you can into a single conduit.. if its anything AC or inherently noisy (ie motors/transformers) it needs its own conduit.

dont forget to ground your EMT at some point so it can provide RF shielding, if all the metal housed cameras are mounted to metal boxes and you ground it somewhere you'll have really good lightning protection for your network.

 

[bp2008]

Sounds like a ton of work to me, running conduit and fishing that many cables through. I would consider running more switches in different locations so I would not have to run as many cables as far.

 

[smoothie]

@nayr it is just Cat5e and RG6 for DirecTV, no AC or anything noisy. On the topic of grounding does it matter where in the layout of the conduit I ground it ? I was thinking at the corner of my house where it is nearest the ground but that is also one of the farthest points from the central data hub/server room/garage.
@bp2008 Unfortunately the layout of my house is such that running it under the eaves with or without conduit really is the easiest option. I have tall vaulted ceilings and there is not network cabling already in the house, it was built in 1972. It is going to be a ton of work no matter how I do it so I might as well do it right the first time

 

[nayr]

dont matter where its grounded, as long as its all connected together properly.