Telephone problem

beefster

Right here goes. I've moved into a new house and found one of my phone sockets not working. Upon removing the cover plate of the plug in box I found it was not conected. Simplt thought I, so I connected them up confirming the correct colour code corresponded to other boxes in the house. But....As soon as i plugged anything in all the phones in the house ring continually. Unplug and they stop. Plug them in elsewhere its oK. I have changed the plug in box to no avail as the fault still occurs.

The box has three 6 core cbles attached and the colours are as per the Reader digest DIY manual and are all connected fine as are the other boxes. All phones in the house work OK. I have added externsion sockets on before and am confident all terminations are OK through the house but......... the wiring is all enclosed or under floor boards so can not be sure there is not a connection box hidden away somewhere although I can not find one.

There are 7 boxes through the house 2 of which are not used.
Any help welcomed.

Woby_Tide

If all the phones ring at once it is something to do with their not being enough power on circuit for them I thought?

However looking at this post from google maybe not, hope it helps anyway
Speaking as an ex-BT faultsman, I can say that all the theories of excessive REN numbers are a bit off the beam. If the REN numbers are too high, the phones will either ring weakly, or not at all, if there are there are too many sounders on the line. It won`t cause continuous ringing (Daniel Murfin`s explanation in the current issue - no. 171, is, unfortunately, not correct) The problem can be caused by a couple of things. There could be a short-circuit between one "leg" of the pair of wires to the "third" wire, which is the ringing circuit,in which case, other odd problems (which I won`t go into now) would manifest themselves, or (more likely) there is a reversal in the wiring (usually sloppy DIY jobs) somewhere between the phone sockets (terminals 2 & 5) or possibly the modem and/or its lead. This has the effect of connecting the sounders straight across the 50 volts D.C. which is always standing on the line, and by-passing a blocking capacitor in the master socket, (the ringing current from the telephone exchange is A.C.) thereby making them "ring" continuously when a phone is plugged in the faulty wired socket or any beyond that point It quite often stops when one or other of the receivers are lifted. Just for the record, there should be only one master socket in the system somewhere (it has extra components in it, but it doesn`t actually matter exactly where it`s located in the wiring run)All the others are "secondary" sockets. The incoming line from the outside world, which is just two wires, should be connected to terminals 2 & 5, paralleled all the way through. Some people connect all the spare wires in the cabling to other terminals, but this isn`t necessary. Terminal 3 on all the sockets should be connected together, but NOT to anything else. Hope this helps.

divadee

Look at the 'REN' value of each phone (there should be a sticker on the bottom og the phone). A normal home line can not handle more than 4 REN so if you go that each phone has a REN of 1, no more than 4 phones can be plugged into the phone line.

HTH  ;D

Just read the above post properly, and i have to disagree with that BT enginner (not the poster). This has happened to me at my old house and i did the above and it solved it straight away.

jake_bullet_2

If there are 3 cables in this box and only 2 non working extensions this suggests that one of the cables may go nowhere..

If you get a continuous ringing when a phone is plugged in there is a line reversal somewhere in the circuit.

The first step is to identify which of the cables are live, it's possible that this is more than one if this socket used to be mid loop and it was removed due to problems and the two loop ends connected together to make all the other sockets live.

If you have access to a meter, check across the blue/white and white/blue for 50 volts, this will tell you which cables are live.

If not, connect one cable only and plug the phone in. If you are really lucky you will have found the live cable and the fault will be in one of the other cables, check the other phones for proper operation and close up.

If the phone doesn't work then disconnect that cable, it must be dead (this might be the one that goes to the other non working socket) and try one of the other cables.

Post back the result if you could please.

beefster

Not at the house at the moment but it is def not the Ren idea as I tried taking all but one phone out of the equation. Further if I plug the same amount of phones into other sockets the problem does not arise.
I favour a cross over but am confused as to why the fault does not occur when phones are plugged in elsewhere? I will have a dabble later...... I just hope the cross over is in one of the boxes and not under the floor in a junction box or similar. I have nothing plugged into the socket at present and everything is OK.

LMck111

beefster.

With continuous ringing, as stated above, there are numerous reasons as to what is wrong.
REN has nothing to do with it.

Is your house wired in series or parrallel,
combination of both?

How many main line sockets ?

How many slave sockets ?

In what area do you live ?
(Not that, this will affect your tele fault).

What I would do is break the circuit down socket by socket starting from the incoming point, branching further along the circuit.

The problem will definitly be a wiring fault.
Keep [glow=blue,2,300]2 to Blue[/glow]
and broken blue to 5 Orange to 3(ringing).
If you have main line sockets in the run do not wire Orange 3 wire to these.
Use that 3 to push to the next slave socket.

Hope that helps.

Regards from your friendly neighbourhood BT man.

aussielle

We had the continual ringing problem in our old house.

If I remember rightly, I think it was when we had just had new carpets fitted. The carpet fitter had hammered a gripper rod through the cable and we had to run a new one to fix it.