a few months back i wired our upstairs bedroom for cable tv and installed and had the cable company inspect it and had them install an amplifier. the amplifier is plugged in the nursery circut, which doesnt have anything plugged in that room except a light. about every hour or so our cable (upstairs only) goes completly fuzzy for 3-4 minutes then back to normal. after checking in the basement, there are a few spots where there are electrical lines that come within an inch or so from the cable line. i am not sure what is on those circuts, but is it possible that something that is not on all the time but only periodicly could cause some type of interferince? the appliances i was thinking about are the fridge, chest freezer, furnace or sump pump. is it possible one of these are causing interferience? at this point i dont think i would be able to relocate either the electrical or the cable. would there be any other solution to this? i have called the cable company and they say we would have to pay for them to come and try to fix it because they did not install it and that costs money we dont have! any help would be appriciated.

After a little more investigating, I can now report this. On my circut panel all possible connections are tight and read 0.00 on my meter. When I return to the cable box and remove the coax (there is nothing going into or out of the box except power) I place one probe into the vent hole on the box and the other probe into the ground hole of the outlet and I am getting a reading of 13.2 When I replace the coax I get 0.00. Its almost as if there is something wrong with the box and the coax is acting as a ground for the box. Any thoughts.???

I did this recently for a family's new house and my own as well, and yosemitebill's description summed the process up. In my home, I knew where my 'home office' was going to be so I added extra CAT5e there to account for the additional equipment. I also had 5.1 surround sound and knew that the TV would be in one of two locations, so I wired speaker wire in a way that either location could be used without re-fishing wires. I also beefed up the number of RG6 and CAT5e plugs in those areas (enough for my network enabled devices). Considering this is a rental, what I would recommend is having 1 CAT5e/CAT6, 1 RG6, and 1 telephone to each room. You probably want two setups in the tv/living room. You can add speaker jacks if you want. I prefer bananna jacks but they're more money. This recommendation is pretty minimum since this is a rental - it's enough to prevent you from having to drill holes in floors/walls and gets you credit for having in-house wiring. If this was a personal home, my 'recomendation' would change. Similarly you could go crazy and try and anticipate every scenario placing multiple plugs on each wall but the costs for that goes up so you'll have to decide what's worth anticipating and what you'll get back from tenants for doing more. Also, what will the access be like to add new lines in the future? Using a centralized closet to run all the cables to will keep wire costs down. It will also be a good spot to place the wireless access point / wireless router. If the closet is at one end of the house, then the other end might struggle to get good wi-fi and you might end up using more wiring. Make sure to have all wires labeled on both ends. I have probably 15 RJ-45 plugs but only use 4 or 5 at a time. Since large ethernet switches can get expensive, I use a small switch and keep the unused wires unplugged. The same thing goes with the RG6. If I had all of them connected at once I would need some amplification, which was pointless for me since only 3 cables have something connected to them. If you buying the plugs and wire yourself, try monoprice.

along with wayne's post, RG6 is a shielded cable which means it has a metallic shield inside the insulation the entire length of the cable. In a cable TV situation (as in outside supplied), there should be a grounding block where the cable from the provider is attached. There will be a grounding wire from that block to attach to your household grounding electrode system. The shielding prevents unwanted interference from elecromagnetic fields. If you are speaking of inside the home, the connector of the cable contacts that same shield and it is attached to whatever device it is attached to and is effectively grounded through that pathway.