Screw the ceiling, in my next house I want to be able to crawl under the floor 
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We are a bit prone to floodong but that also seems cool.
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I donāt find dropped ceilings fun to work in at all. Ceiling tiles around the edges when you most often need access are blocked by framing and canāt be moved. Ceiling tiles elsewhere get hung-up on the steel cable holding the support frame up. Aircon ducts hold many of the tiles down and block your access to run cables, as do the steel cables mentioned. IMHO, the thing most houses would benefit from is having boards installed to walk on in the unfinished crawl space, and a slightly larger opening with built-in steps/ladder closer to a proper attic.
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Will keep this in mind
That is a proper crawlspace
Im just curious: Because you cant run PoE on Fiber why would you want to use PoE to power this? Presumably, your house already has power in it, but also Fiber can go great distances. Why not just put a switch on each end of your house, or each floor (however you need things done) and run Fiber as the link between them (10g, 20g, 40g, 100g whatever you need) and then use Cat6 from there since you can get 10g now even with that. Unless each box has some kind of switch in it you cannot split fiber out like that.
I donāt want to sound mean: but do you know you cannot send power over fiber? The amount of energy in the fiber is minimal and is photons, not electrons.
If you want Ethernet outlets in your house then that is easy and doable and even upgradeable. You can even get very high speeds with it. Having a basement or attic (or both) can be very helpful in installing this and much easier to do. Fiber requires special tools and skills to run in the manner you suggest. There is nothing quite like running a fiber bundle and then trying to track down a break in one. Fiber isnt nearly as easy to work with as ethernet.
Basically, just an idea that fiber transmission should be self-powered just like Ethernet is self powered.
Yes, hence PoE to boost the network equipment.
Also, PoE is a pretty nice way to do DC in your house - as lights, anything with USB connections and even bigger devices like computer screens, laptops et cetera could be powered by domestic DC and PoE. Atleast in theory.
In practice, anything more than a few LED strips will probably be too much for PoE right now, the spec needs to grow and we need more crazy people running direct DC power in unsafe installations doing all kinds of crazy experiments with DC cabling first. You know, like we did with AC power, though no one remembers that 
But in order for the āspec to growā and be able to power more things you need fat cables (to handle current) and will also need to introduce protections for the power (safety issues), and then you are at the very same place as the current home electrical. Only if you did this with a low voltage DC system like 48v then you would end up with wires in the wall twice as thick as the AC wires are to handle twice as much current for the lower voltage.
but if you have to run the poe cable anywayā¦why not just use it to send the data along? If you are just using poe to send power then you may as well use the AC cable in the wall that sends power anywayā¦if EoP was faster you could just use it to do the same thing with your AC power lines in your house.
If by āa pretty nice wayā you mean āthe worst possible wayā. Itās expensive, complex and inefficient. It makes no sense for anything other than devices which need ethernet connections anyhow and have pretty low power requirements.
A simple -48VDC power distribution system would make far more sense, if any DC system does.
Sure, but 48V power distribution is freakinā expensive compared to CAT6, and difficult to maintain to boot.
Then you have the other fun part - that there are several conflicting voltage levels. Not really a problem in theory, you can just measure the resistance of your device and do some calculations to treat your device resistance load + whatever resistance your power has, to make a nice even voltage distribution. In practice? There is this fun thing called heat, that gets worse as more resistance is added. The more resistances and power you add to the 48V conduit the warmer it gets, according to P=RIĀ².
There is no real standard way to hook up a 5V or 3.3V device to a 48V rail, is what Iām getting at, and even if there was, heat dissipation becomes a real problem on a 5A 48V conduit (1,2 kW) - not to mention a 10A 48V (~4,8 kW) or 16A (~12,3 kW). Using the old trick of cutting the power in half using resistors, well, just not recommended during those conditions.
Then again I only know enough about DC to hurt myself; this is a topic I am very ignorant in, and Iām sure people are laughing their arse off reading this. So I might very well be off here.
I am sure you can get bulk 2-conductor wire no more expensive than CAT6 with larger conductors.
There are ābuck convertersā available dirt cheap.
Proper -48VDC (input) SMPS units are available as well.
Iām not sure if you mean connecting devices in series, or using resistors to drop voltages, but either way, you should 100% NOT even consider doing that.
Hereās a set for $1.30/ea inc s+h:
This particular set seems to be rated for a max 0.8A so a 5V device would be able to draw, at most, 4Wā¦ Even worse than PoE.
Just the cheapest ones I found quickly. Theyāll serve most uses.
How much more current do you want? 3A units are about $2/ea.
Hereās a 10-15A unit under $8:
PoE doesnāt output 5V. PoE devices that operate on 5V will just have a DC-DC converter internally, that is just like these.
Yep, and you still have no 48V connectors on most devices ^^
If you take a look at most devices today, they donāt do 48V or 24V or 12V, only USB do 5V the rest do 16V, 17V, 18V, 18.5V, 20Vā¦ Just take 10 random AC/DC wall plugs and compare. Thankfully this is kind of changing with USB-C but you still need 48V to power some stuff.
If you are going to run DC+AC (still need AC for big power stuff like most kitchen stuff and laundry dryers) 48V generic cables really suck, works for single appliances like lights and powering your fiberoptics but a better standard is required.
Iām not against DC alongside AC cabling though, Iām just lamenting the fact that no one is pushing for a 48V standards connection that can be used to power all kinds of devices (like AC does it), and the closest Iāve seen for a standard DC outlet is an RJ45 Ethernet port.
Hope that makes it clearer where Iām coming from
Just like with AC, it just makes sense to have external power supplies to run your various devices from 48VDC, outputting whatever voltage they need.
PoE is very complex, expensive, inefficient, provides very low power levels, and canāt at all āpower all kinds of devices (like AC does it).ā
Itās true thereās no single type of connector dominant for 48VDC but that just takes a few interested parties coordinating to make that happen.
@wertigon have you figured things out yet?
I think the issue you had is the power delivery of the device with the fiber switch. I had initially thought that you could just buy a 2.5 or 10GbE switch with SFP+ ports and just hide it in a drop down ceiling/crawl space and just do passthrough for the RJ45 outlets. But that sounds costly quickly depending on how many rooms you want to service.
Maybe its more sane to just stick to cat 6A for now and put the fiber backend to where you think you will need the raw data throughput:
- server room (basement/attic/garage)
- office (where you are usually staring at your monitor/display)
- living room/home theater system
The rest of the room could be serviced with GbE via the nearest fiber backend.
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Have not figured it out completely, no. But what you say makes most sense I think 
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