swestrup: (Default)
swestrup ([personal profile] swestrup) wrote2007-03-18 05:20 pm

Telephone Forensics.

Just spent much of the last hour with [livejournal.com profile] taxlady tracing phone lines to figure out how the house is wired. We have two phone lines, and there is much evidence that lines have been cut, spliced and re-routed in the past. We have determined that the repositioning of the house's main phone junction box is unlikely to be the horrible disaster I had feared. The one line that may have to be cut and rerun is a short line for a single jack, not the feed for the upper two floors, as I had believed.

If I screw up its wiring, all we'll lose is that one jack. I would be far more confident of the job if they didn't insist on color-coding the wires. Worse, this is Quebec so I can't even trust that the right color wire was used for the right signal, even if I wasn't color blind and could read the wires. Now, I do have a phone tester which I plan to use to ensure that after I have opened up and played with the innards of a box, that the phones are correctly wired.

There's only two problems:
 
  1. Its output is color-coded.
  2. Its telling me that one of the houses two lines (the original one) is universally mis-wired.

Okay, first I'm going to go and read up on correct phone wiring procedures in my Library Book of Same, and then I shall grit my teeth and do the job. If we lose all phone and internet connectivity for the next six months, you'll know what caused it.

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