ENERGY TIPS

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Locating the Primary

If possible, follow the station wire from the interface through the house wall, along cellar beams, and through floor or wall to the primary telephone outlet. In apartments, locate the emerging wire in a utility closet if you can. In some buildings you won't be able to find it till it emerges from the wall or floor at your primary phone location.

In older homes, the line may be routed between cellar-floor beams, through closets and walls via antique ceramic insulators and terminal blocks (which look like they came out of a mad-scientist movie), and along sets of parallel wires covered with dusty, old, black, woven fabric and cracked rubber insulation that may be more than 100 years old, but will still carry the phone current.

Eventually, the line will arrive at a telephone or a vacant wiring block. This is your primary phone (All other telephones beyond this outlet are technically extensions.). Remove the flat face plate covering a wall outlet or the box-cover of externally mounted wall jacks to expose plastic wiring blocks.

All wiring blocks will contain four separate wiring posts, brass screws with a pair of little brass washers that screw into individual brass plugs molded into the plastic.

The wiring posts look to be awfully close together, especially if you are new to electronic wiring. This proximity can cause problems. If the R and G posts ever were to be connected inside the wiring block, the circuit would close and TelCo line-signal current coming out from the main battery would turn around and flow right back in a fruitless "short circuit"—without passing through the telephone. The phone would go dead and callers would hear a continual busy signal. However, no matter how tiny the posts and how small the wiring blocks, the posts are completely insulated from one another by the nonconductive plastic formed around and separating them.

WARNING: NEVER LET WIRES OF TWO COLORS COME INTO CONTACT Any time you go into the phone wiring, take special care not to let so much as one tiny strand of wire make a permanent connection between one color wiring post and another. It is especially easy to create such an inadvertent short circuit if you are using multistrand wire, so all station wire and hookup wire going into a wiring block is solid ...or it should be. Multistrand wire flexes better than solid, so is used in instrument-to-wiring block cords, in handset cords and in the wires of many accessories you may want to connect via the phone lines. If you ever find it necessary to attach multistrand wire to a wiring block, it is highly advisable to solidify it. Strip enough wire to wrap around the wiring-post terminal screw (but no more-a half-inch at most). Twist tight, heat with a soldering iron and "tin" into a solid core by melting high-quality electronics solder and letting it flow into the wire and harden. Snip off any errant strands that weren't captured in the soldered core using side-cutting pliers or a sharp knife.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print