Moving a BT socket

heroicnich

Hello,

Just bought a new house and moved in over the weekend (yay!). At present the BT socket is in the hall, right at the bottom of the stairs. The line arrives on the front of the house, then comes through a hole at the top of the front door, and runs down the side of the hall (pinned to the top of the skirting, basically). What I'd like to know is - how hard would it be to move the socket, so that instead of running down the hall, it went through the wall into the living room? I don't mean the bit about putting it through the wall exactly, more like 'how hard is it to move the socket, and will BT shout at me for fiddling with their wiring?' And does anyone have any advice about the best way to get phone points up onto the first floor and into the attic room? As we only have the one phone point at the moment, and I am far too lazy to be running downstairs all the time!

Thanks for all your help!
Nich x

ariba10

It might be cheaper and easier to get a set of cordless phones. Argos do a nice set of four Panasonic cordless for under £120.

gooismeid

As previous poster says, easiest would be to get a set of cordless phones. The main one plugs into the current BT socket, and the others can be put wherever you want provided there's an electric socket for them to go into! Moving the original BT box might be tricky but you can always use an extension set to run a cable from the original BT socket to wherever you'd like a new socket to be. But I reckon cordless phones are the way to go. It just means you'll have a "spare" one in the hall as well as phones where you really want them!

Hunnymonster

In your situation I'd look to install extension sockets - as it happens the way our house was built, the main telephone point is behind the TV in the living room - very cleverly placed to be almost totally useless....

So I wired in my extensions (with the wiring inside the walls, under the floors, over the ceilings etc - hard work but no visible cables in my house for anything, except between appliance and wall).

Now the main socket is still where it was (with nothing plugged in) - but I now have 5 other extension points available (bedroom, kitchen, comms cupboard (where the DSL & wireless router and the Satellite/TV/VHF distribution system lives) at the bottom of the stairs, study, and a reasonably located one in the living room) - though not all are in use.

heroicnich

I take the point about having cordless phones with base stations upstairs... we actually have one of those, but because the BT socket is on the 'wrong' side of the hall, it is miles (well, many metres) from a power socket! So either we run a long phone extension cable to the power bit (which involves having a wire trailing across the hall at the bottom of the stairs) or we run a power extension to the phone socket - same problem! My question came from the fact that the phone wire enters the house right next to the living room, and so it seems 'untidy' to have it coming into a socket (which BT put in a daft place, IMHO - the hall is too narrow to have a table or shelf with the phone on, and I don't want it on the wall) and then running wires back towards the front door! I like the idea of running extensions from the main socket, any advice about doing that would be well appreciated.

Thanks for all your thoughts!

theadore_2

BT are likely to be very anal with their wiring... not quite sure where the cut off is, but im pretty sure they still own from teh socket onwards and so you will be charged for any damage done... bear in mind its something like £70 for an engineer should anything go wrong.

that said its not a hard job, good drill though the wall, filler gun... any internal extention stuff you do i would recommend argos or wickes as the cheapest for that kind of thing.

best bet would be to run an extention into which ever room you like and then look at a cordless phone if you need more flexibility.

Hunnymonster

Agreed - I know of someone <ahem><cough> who relocated his/her BT master socket - in fact replaced all the wiring from the junction box on the outside of the house to get the BT socket into a more sensible place in the house (ie. not in a poky little hall) and the only time there was a comment from BT was when they had a technician in for something else (putting in a second line I think) - that the previous job "was very tidily done"

2 wires - should be very hard to go wrong - but if it does - be prepared for BT to charge handsomely to put it right.