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Category: Home and Apartments : Do It Yourself and Repairs
With the increased use of modems and fax machines, more and more people are looking to get second phone lines installed into their home/apartments.
When you call your phone company to get that second phone line, they'll charge you quite a bit to get that line installed.
There will be a monthly fee for the line itself, $30-ish one time fee for activation, and $80-ish fee to "install" the phone line in your home/apartment. Now, not much can be done about the activation and monthy fees... but the $80 installation can be done yourself... and it's remarkably easy.
The hard part is finding easy instructions on how to do it. I hope to provide those here. I will admit that I'm not an expert at this. In fact, I searched the web myself to find out how to do this. I was able to find some resources, but for one reason or another, I found the instructions to be unclear. None of the pages I found gave me a clear enough explaination. I ended up fumbling around and figuring it out myself. But these pages did give me something to start with.
Here are the pages I found. You may find them useful to fill in some gaps I might leave out.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/phone_wiring.html - This article probably provides the best introduction for beginners.
http://www.rhythm.com/~mcguire/secondline.html
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4116/ - This is very technical. Not really for absolute beginners.
Overview
Your phone line is basically a big cord coming from the phone company and coming into your apartment/home.
The phone cord that runs in your house is a single cord that usually contains 4 wires. One phone number/line only needs 2 wires to work. So, that single cord can carry 2 phone lines (ie. 2 phone numbers).
Note that the Yellow and Black wires are unused. Your second phone line (555-2222, let's say) will run on those wires.
NOTE: This isn't one big continuous wire from the phone company to your phone. There are 2 important locations where the wire stops and starts again.
Location 1: Outside your Home
The telephone cord comes to a box outside your house. When you get your second phone line activated, the Phone Company is responsible for connecting that line up to this Box that is outside your house/apartment. This is covered by the $30 activation fee. So, once this is set up, you could take your phone to this box and plug it in, and your second phone line would be working. Neat, but not that convenient.
The BOX is a grey box outside your home. There are 2 compartments to this box. One is for the telephone company, the other is for you to mess with. You'll need at most a screwdriver to open this box. When you open it, this is what you'll find:
This isn't as complex as it looks. What this shows is 2 phone lines. One which is properly connected (Line #1 - 555-1111) and one that has not yet been connected (Line #2 - 555-2222)
The key here is this. The plugs on the right side are connected to the Phone Company. So, once the Phone Company activates your second line (555-2222)... you could take your phone down to this box, plug it in the top Phone Jack and your second phone line (555-2222) would work on that phone! You could take it a step further... and get a crazy long phone cord, plug one end in here and bring the other end into your house/apartment through the window or whatever... and you're done! But that would be an ugly solution.
Take a look at the left side of the picture. See the "This wire goes into house"? The other end of that wire comes out behind the phone jack in your house.
So, STEP ONE is to connect the Black/Yellow wires here to the Green/Red terminals.
BLACK WIRE -> GREEN TERMINAL
YELLOW WIRE -> RED TERMINAL
Location 2: Phone jack in your home
Now, you just have to find the other end of this phone cord. You'll find it behind the Phone Jacks (where you normally plug in your phone).
You'll need a screwdriver to unscrew the phone jack from the wall.
Again, this isn't that complex. Most people have more than one phone jack in their homes. As a result, how does this one phone cord supply all phone jacks? Well, as you can see, in Phone Jack A - it sends the red/green wires down, which connect to the jack, and then connect back to the wire which continues.
In Phone Jack B, all four wires come down to the Phone Jack and come back up. Finally, Phone Jack C is the terminal end. The Red/Green wires connect to the Phone Jack C and that's it. Note the free Yellow and Black wires that are unused.
Now, the reason I show all these combinations is that you may run across any of these (or others). Let me point out, though, Phone Jack B is already wired for a second phone line - so you probably won't have this unless your home/apt has been previously wired for a second phone line.
What you want to do...
Ok - so here it is. As I've said before - your second phone line is now running on the Yellow and Black wires.
You want to make Phone Jack A (see diagram) to look like Phone Jack B. Or, if you've got something that looks like Phone Jack C, then you want to connect the loose Yellow/Black wires to Phone Jack C.
If you unscrew the phone jack, and look at the back of it - this is what you will see. NOTE: The wires coming from your PHONE CORD are NOT SHOWN in this diagram.
If this were Phone Jack A (previous diagram), you would see 2 additional Red wires going to terminal 1, 2 additional Green wires going to Terminal 2. The reason there would be 2 additional wires is because you'd have both the wire GOING to the Phone Jack and LEAVING the Phone Jack and going back into the cable.
If this were Phone Jack B, you would see 2 additional Red wires going to Terminal 1, 2 additional Green wires going to Terminal 2, 2 additional Yellow wires going to Terminal 3, 2 additional Black wires going to Terminal 4.
If this were Phone Jack C, you would see 1 additional Red wire going to Terminal 1, and 1 additional Green wire going to Terminal 2.
How to Wire It.
So, you want to connect the Yellow and Black wires to the Terminals that have Yellow and Black wires connected to it. Pretty easy - eh?
Well, here is a picture of a fully wired phone jack. This is what Phone Jack B looks like from the back.
I know - it looks complicated... but just follow one color and see how it works. It's actually pretty intuitive. Yellow goes to Yellow terminal, goes back to Yellow wire.
ONE MORE THING
There's one more thing you need.
Right now, if you plug a regular phone into this properly wired jack... you'll still be using Line #1 (555-1111). In order to utilize Line #2, you need either a 2-Line phone or an Adapter.
The Adapter can be bought for a few dollars at Radio Shack. Here's a diagram of it.
The Left Most Phone Plug is Line 1
The Middle Phone Plug is Line 2
The Right Phone Plug is Line 1 and Line 2 (for two-line phones)
That's It
I hope that did a reasonable job explaining how to wire up your second phone line. Once you know how it works, it's very easy to do. You may run into situations that you won't be able to figure out, but at least you know you gave it a shot before shelling out the $80 to the phone company.
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