Home Automation - Additional Phone Jack

I also need to install a phone jack in the basement. It appears that I need to run the bell cable from the phone company's panel on the exterior of my house.

1. Should I just twist the ends of the new wires together with the existing wire ends and re-attach them to the terminals? Any potential disasters? I don't want to damage anything and lose the phone service all together.

2. If by accident, two different color wires touch each other, would they short out the phone lines? If so, what do I do?

3. Homedepot says that I should keep the bell cable 6 inch away from any power cables. But I was hoping to use the same holes on the studs... Can I do that?

Thanks again.

1. Yes, you can just twist the same color wires together and put both under the screw terminal.

2. If you connect the red and green wires together it takes the phone line "off-hook" till they are no longer shorted. No harm is done. Just don't leave them shorted.

3. I would run them in separate holes. It may be required by code. The idea here is that you don't want the possibility of insulation getting rubbed off and putting line voltage on your telephone.

Thanks for the advise. I have completed the job to add new phone jacks yesterday evening. To share my experience with those who will do similar jobs themselves, I discovered that the juction box that the phone company puts outside my house has an outer casing and an inner casing (my phone company is Bell Atlantic). They prefer that people don't mess with the wiring in the inner casing. So, I found it was alot easier to handle the wiring from my basement. I just added a junction box (purchased from Home Depot for $7.50) inside:

1. Cut the phone cable and sort out the colors. My house was built in 1978 and the internal phone wire has six different colors. Compare the wires with a working phone jack in the house and determin which colors are active. For houses with one telephone line, only two colors are necessary; two lines four colors. Just wrap the extra colored wired and leave them there.

2. Using one end of the cut phone cable as input (this is the half that goes to the outside to the exterior phone company junction box), attach it to the interior junction box. Attaching the other end as an output.

3. Attach additional output lines as necessary. The junction box I bought has enough slots for 7-8 more lines.

Good luck to everyone.

The reason you don't run power an communications wires together, is that
you don't want to induce AC hum into
the telephone wire.