Emc2Net HomeLab - Home Office / Lab

Home Office / Lab
Home Office / Lab

I needed a place to have the HomeLab and my own Home Office/Lab. After all, they sent us to work from home and couldn’t go to the office or school for months because of the COVID pandemic.

I was lucky to have a room in the basement I could use for this purpouse, a 2,40m x 3,12m room with no enough power and no network infrastructure what so ever.

The first thing I wanted to do was to install some power sockets and some network RJ45 sockets for all the devices I was planning to have at the office. I was doing some renovations on the first floor and I had access to an electrician, so I took the chance and he did this jobb and some upgrades in the main distribution board at home. This is what we did to prepare this room:

  • Installation of a PVC cable tray to install all power and network sockets.

  • Installation of 18 x RJ45 sockets using keystone ports and CAT-6a ethernet cable with support for up to 10Gbps. All the cables terminated in a “TeleSafe 19” 24-ports aluminium keystone-patchpanel"1 from Lanse(no) installed in a 600x800x988mm 18U rack cabinet. The rack cabinet has wheels and with the extra length of all the ethernet cables I can move the rack without problems for maintenance or installation of new components.

    Installation of a CAT-6a ethernet cable from the keystone-patchpanel in the basement to the ceiling in the living room on the ground floor to be used by a WiFi AP via POE.

    The Ethernet cable used was the “R&M freenet U/FTP Cat.6A 650 MHz 4PxAWG23”2, capable among other things of being used for 10/100/1000Base-T, 10GBase-T, POE, POE+, 4PPOE, UPOE and UPOE+.

  • Installation of 20 x (EU) power sockets connected to a new/dedicated 220V/16A circuit using 2,5mm cable with a dedicated “Eaton PKPM2-16/2/C/003-A”3 ground fault breaker.

    A 220V/16A circuit has a maximum capacity of 3.520W. Taking into account that we should have a 20 percent safety margin, the maximun load I can use with this circuit is around 2.816W. More than enough for my used, even using all the equipment I plan to use in this room at the same time. This circuit is used exclusively for electronic equipment.

After the power and network infrastructure were in place, I built myself the workbench and bookshelves from solid oak wood.

  • WorkBench: L-shape with 2 parts: 1) 2,40m x 0,90m 2) 1,00m x 0,62m, almost 2,80m2 of workspace. Thickness:40mm. Height:0,75m. Solid metal legs capable of supporting several hundred kilos
  • Bookshelves: 2,40m x 0,30m. Thickness: 20mm.

Here you have some pictures from the installation work and the final result:

Home office
Power and network RJ45 sockets installation
Home office
Distribution board upgrade
Home office
Extra length - ethernet cables
Home office
Extra length - ethernet cables
Home office
Patchpanel back / inside rack cabinet
Home office
Patchpanel front
Home office
Upgraded distribution board

  1. TeleSafe 19" 24-ports aluminium keystone-patchpane
    https://e-mc2.net/files/patchpanel-telesafe.pdf ↩︎

  2. R&M freenet U/FTP Cat.6A 650 MHz 4PxAWG23
    https://e-mc2.net/files/DATA_SH-C6A-U-FTP-650MHz-LSFRZH-GY-R833675-B.pdf ↩︎

  3. Eaton PKPM2-16/2/C/003-A
    https://e-mc2.net/files/Eaton-108111-PKPM2-16-2-C-003-A-en_GB.pdf ↩︎