Wall Plate Location

When installing wall plates, you must decide the best location on the wall. Obviously, the wall plate should be fairly near the workstation, and in fact, the ANSI/TIA-568-C.1 standard says that the maximum length from the workstation to the wall plate patch cable can be no longer than 5 meters (16′). This short distance will affect exactly where you place your wall plates in your design. If you already have your office laid out, you will have to locate the wall plates as close as possible to the workstations so that your wiring system will conform to the standard.

Additionally, you want to keep wall plates away from any source of direct heat that could damage the connector or reduce its efficiency. In other words, don't place a wall plate directly above a floor heating register or baseboard heater.

A few guidelines exist for where to put your wall plates on a wall for code compliance and the most trouble-free installation. You must account for the vertical and horizontal positions of the wall plate. Both positions have implications, and you must understand them before you design your cabling system. We'll examine the vertical placement first.

Vertical Position

When deciding the vertical position of your wall plates, you must take into account either the residential or commercial National Electrical Code (NEC) sections. Obviously, which section you go by depends on whether you are performing a residential or commercial installation.

In residential installations, you have some flexibility. You can place a wall plate in almost any vertical position on a wall, but the NEC suggests that you place it so that the top of the plate is no more than 18″ from the subfloor (the same distance as electrical outlets). If the wall plate is intended to service a countertop or a wall phone, the top of the plate should be no more than 48″ from the subfloor. These vertical location requirements are illustrated in Figure 1.

 
Figure 1: Wall plate vertical location

Note

The vertical heights may be adjusted, if necessary, for elderly or disabled occupants, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines.

Tip

Remember that the vertical heights may vary from city to city and from residential to commercial electrical codes.

Horizontal Position

Wall plates should be placed horizontally so that they are as close as possible to work-area equipment (computers, phones, etc.). As previously mentioned, the ANSI/TIA-568-C.1 standard requires that work-area cables should not exceed 5 meters (16′). Wall plates should therefore be spaced so that they are within 5 meters of any possible workstation location. This means you will have to know where the furniture is in a room before you can decide where to put the wall plates for the network and phone. Figure 2 illustrates this horizontal-position requirement.

 
Figure 2: Horizontal wall plate placement

Tip

When placing telecommunications outlets, consider adding more than one per room to accommodate rearrangement of the furniture. It usually helps to "mirror" the opposing wall-outlet layout (i.e., north-south and east-west walls will be mirror images of each other with respect to their outlet layout).

Another horizontal-position factor to take into account is the proximity to electrical fixtures. Data communications wall plates and wall boxes cannot be located in the same stud cavity as electrical wall boxes when the electrical wire is not encased in metal conduit. (A stud cavity is the space between the two vertical wood or metal studs and the drywall or wallboard attached to those studs.)

The stud-cavity rule primarily applies to residential telecommunications wiring as per the ANSI/TIA-570-B standard. The requirement, as illustrated in Figure 3, keeps stray electrical signals from interfering with communications signals. Notice that even though the electrical outlets are near the communications outlets, they are never in the same stud cavity.

 
Figure 3: Placing telecommunications outlets and electrical wall boxes in different stud cavities