Home Improvement

has anyone ran cat6 rated for direct burial? i have looked at too many images of AI cable and reviews are all over the place. think i will need 50' from router under the house to a ground protector, then another 50' underground to the outbuilding.

Goatface said:

has anyone ran cat6 rated for direct burial? i have looked at too many images of AI cable and reviews are all over the place. think i will need 50' from router under the house to a ground protector, then another 50' underground to the outbuilding.

Click to expand...

Edit: I can't remember if I went over this already in this thread, so sorry if I am repeating myself.
I looked into it some years ago and decided a wireless bridge was cheaper and easier. When you are building your house it's even easier, as you can have them run a Cat-6 out to the eave of your house for it (or do it yourself), and it's PoE, so no other wires needed.

Since the camera people at IPCamtalk recommend factory joined male connectors, if you are going to use male connectors, I used appropriate lengths from Monoprice for all Cat-6 runs. That was probably overkill and could have used female connectors for the in wall runs, then patch cables for that last few inches to the devices. It adds connection points, but they should all be protected enough not to cause issues.

The Unifi/Ubiquity bridge is very nice and can go a long way (~9 miles), as long as it has a direct line of sight. This is their equivalent current bridge listed on the site. [Edit: finding their various products can be difficult. HERE is what I am using, since it doesn't need all the features of the more expensive "pro" version. They have other bridges in their nano line as well, like here and here.] They have other bridges and you might be able to find an older cheaper model, depending on how much data or devices you will be using. You don't need a router at the other end, just an access point.

The recommendations I found for buried Cat6 was using conduit and underground rated wire together. Not only that, I read reports of people's systems getting fried by close lightning strikes, when nothing else was hurt, so the recommendation was to put protection at each end of the run. After reading that, I moved on to a fiberoptic run instead, which still needed conduit, but didn't have the issue with lightning. Even ordered the fiber line and part of the connectors... before seeing the wireless bridge from unifi.

Edit: Here is a dude walking through setting up the similar multi-directional disk, if you want to see how involved it is (I've used other videos of his to set up my system):