Shoddy Wiring Job

[DIYTECH 0]

Hi all - brand new to the forum. Was looking for some advice. I'm trying to clean up some shoddy work that was done on a CCTV setup. Looks like the original installer used cat5 cables for two cameras each. He wired it as follows:

 

8 wires on the cat 5 line

2 wires to bnc for camera 1 video feed

2 wires to bnc for camera 2 video feed

2 wires to dc power for camera 1 power

2 wires to dc power for camera 2 power

 

all wires are exposed and connected via electrical tape.

 

Multiply this by 48 cameras and it's an entire mess. See picture for an idea of what I'm dealing with.

 

So what's the best way to clean this up? I'm familiar with rj45 and know how to crimp those adapters, but not too familiar with bnc. I assume there's some sort of POE adapter / BNC male adapter that will clean this mess up? Any suggestions will help!

[jeromephone 6]

This is a big enough mess to warrent a full rewire. I would look at possibly using baluns and run seperate power wires. You could also look at changing out the cameras to IP and terminate everything on rj45 or jacks and use a POE switch for the power. If you were to reuse the existing wire and clean it up it may help offset the cost of cameras etc. If you are never going to IP use the existing wire as a pull and install siameze rg59/2 18ga for power. that is kind of step back however

[Horizon 0]

What a rat's nest! I hate to think what's at the other end of that CAT5.

Sharing a CAT5 between two cameras is fine - shouldn't be a problem, but does make neat wiring jobs more challenging.

I'd suggest a Krone punch-down block http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KRONE_LSA-PLUS, or one of their many clones/imitators. This would work great, provided that the CAT5 cable has solid core conductors (stranded conductors can be unreliable in punch-down blocks).

Krone has the advantage of allowing the wires to be secured and strain relieved, and allows the video and power circuits to be neatly split off.

One of the problems with that rat's nest is that if the CAT5 cable is moved about too much, the conductors can get metal fatigue and break. And the insulation tape will fall off eventually.

There should aready be 24 bauns (one for each camera) plugged into the back of your DVR. Here's some stuff about baluns (random link): http://muxlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/CCTV-Balun-Application-Guide.pdf

There will also be a balun at each camera, unless the camera has the balun built in. Remember that baluns are "reverse polarity sensitive". If you get the wiring crossed over, there will be no video. No lasting damage - just no video.

[the toss 0]

As Horizon has said a complete re-think & re-wire is required at the DVR end. 48 cameras would warrant using a small rack mount cabinet. Inside the rack mount a termination panel & fit 48 panel mount baluns. Your cat5 cables can connect to the baluns at the back of the panel using standard data cabling techniques. Then make up 48 BNC-BNC patch cables to go from the baluns to the DVR inputs. For your power I'd use 3 x 16 feed distributed power supply units. The hard part about using cat5 is separating the power pair/s without interrupting the signal pair twist too much and then keeping it neat. It can be done but requires extra expenditure for things like RJ45 terminations etc.

I always break out into a sweat when I come across installs like you have shown

[Bhawan 0]

I would re-wire the whole thing If some did that ****ty of a job who knows how the quality of cable is.

starting from scratch could be faster as well rather than trying to clean up a horrid mess.