Well-designed wiring closets have easily identifiable connections.
A wiring closet is a small room used for making connections between electronic equipment. By housing all connections in a central location, a wiring closet eases troubleshooting and allows for greater flexibility and adaptability in a wiring plan. These rooms are common in office buildings with dozens or hundreds of networked computers, but they can also appear in residential construction. Does this Spark an idea?
Wiring
Wiring closets in commercial and residential buildings usually house connections for telephone lines and data cables. They also may handle the cabling for burglar and fire alarms, security cameras and television systems. Wiring closets may or may not include a building's electrical panel -- the circuit breakers that control the flow of power. Sometimes a wiring closet will house computer equipment, such as routers or servers, and media devices, such as a DVR or video player linked to several TVs.
Convenience
A wiring closet keeps all connections in one place, providing both convenience and adaptability. For example, a single connection point makes it much faster and easier to diagnose problems within a system by checking the connections one after the other, rather than hunting all over the building for spliced lines and jury-rigged connections. And having all cables leading to a single point makes certain changes simpler. Imagine switching a home's TV service from cable to satellite -- or even a roof-mounted antenna. If the home has a wiring closet, there's no need to run a new cable to each TV. Instead, just one new cable needs to be run to the wiring closet; there, connections can be made to all TVs.
Design Do's and Don'ts
A wiring closet can be as tightly or loosely designed as its owner wants it to be. Technology magazines and networking-equipment providers regularly run contests to find the most elegantly designed -- and most chaotically designed -- wiring closets. The "best" designs allow users to clearly identify the connections -- what wire goes where, and what it's doing. Cables are often color coded, such as blue for data, orange for phone and so on. And wires are cleanly bundled so a single cable can be traced from point A to point B. The "worst" designs look like multicolored spaghetti, with no clear sense of what each cable does or where it goes. Excess cable piles up on the floor, and lengths of wire become hopelessly tangled.
Cooling
The more connections and equipment housed in a wiring closet, the more heat they'll generate. Excessive heat can damage the equipment or even start a fire, so any wiring closet design should include a plan for dissipating heat. The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers recommends that a wiring closet stay within a range of 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Depending on the size of the closet and the amount of equipment, the closet may need a vent to another room, a fan, a dedicated connection to the building's air conditioning system or even a dedicated cooling unit.
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