new problem and challenge

[rbig]

I just went to put my new 4 conductor, 2 line wall surface mount jack box on the wall, and ran smack into a new problem.

I thought I had it down pat: two pairs of wires to deal with. one pair would be red and green, the other black and yellow.

What I found when I got in the old box is:

1. two four conductor jacks. One phone number to each of the jacks.

2. A cable coming in from beneath the house with six wires: black, yellow, green, white, red, and blue

3. six pairs of terminals.

4. The six wires from the incoming cable go to the terminals.

5. There are six wires going to each of the four conductor jacks. Each jack has the black, yellow, green, white, red, and blue wires going to it.

Anyway, to the old jack box with my new single 2 line, 4 conductor jack box do I forget about the Blue and white wires, and just use the red-green as one line, and the black-yellow as the other?

Sounds crazy---but there it is.

Oh yeah---will any of those wires bite me? I remember a few years ago when we had a lot of hurricane damage, I found out the hard way that some phone lines can bite. Our yard was ripped up where big trees had gone down, and the phone line broke in several places. The phone company said two months to get someone out and fix. I took jumpers and pieces of wire to get 'em going again. I think I recall some combination of wires had around 50vdc

[AllanJ]

First you need to figure out whether the existing phone lines adhere to the convention of red/green for one line and yellow/black for the other line. Then you can match colors when splicing in a cable going to a different room. Also it is possible that the line one phone (telephone instrument) is always a line one phone regardless of which jack it is plugged into, etc. i.e. there is a custom wiring inside the phone. One possible alternative is to find that the yellow wire is connected to the R terminal and the black wire is connected to the G terminal of the line 2 jack. Drawing a diagram of everything will help.

Any of the lines still connected to the phone company's system can bite. The bite will be more painful if "your phone rings" while you are playing with the wires. I believe the ring voltage is somewhere around 90 volts. If your lines have the more modern network interace, you can unplug cables there and the wires in your home will then be safe to play with.

Because the current (amperage) coming from the phone company equipment miles away is very small (but it takes only a few milliamperes to give you a shock you can feel), depending on what the attached phone is doing (such as being off hook) the voltage you measure will vary.