Basically, I’m building a home and getting it wired with Ethernet cabling. I didn’t want to get too much into the technical details, so I just provided the builders with locations where I want RJ45 ports, along with one spot where I just said “24-port patch panel” (the number of ports located elsewhere being 22.

I did some Googling and figured the patch panel should cost at most $150 in hardware costs (I found plenty of sub-$100 options, but a couple of more expensive ones and would not have been . I didn’t mention anything about needing a rack because I thought it would be something that could just go directly in the wall. (And then I could buy a switch and use it to connect pretty much all the ports from the patch panel to the router.)

The builder came back to me with an estimated cost of:

  • $465 for a server cabinet: SEVCBN -6RU – 66WM
  • $567 for a patch panel: NCO760242563
  • $148 install charge

They gave me specific model numbers for the patch panel and server cabinet, but I can’t find information about whether that’s the actual cost of them, because the costs are locked behind having an account with the B2B retailers.

Does their proposed patch panel costing about 4x what I was expecting actually seem likely to give any value? Is there are explanation for that cost?

Secondary question: is having a wall-mounted cabinet worthwhile? How will it work in terms of installing a switch and connecting from the patch panel to the switch?

Thanks!

  • ZagorathOPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    To be clear, the numbers in the OP are just for the patch panel itself, and the cabinet to house it.

    On top of that, they’re charging $266 per cable (running 4 cables to the same destination? $1064.) That includes installing the wall plates at the other end, buying the cable itself (cat 6a), and the act of running the cables. I didn’t mention that part in the OP because I’m pretty confident it’s a huge rip-off, more on the order of thousands of dollars (22 cables total for an asking price of $5852 or a reasonable price of, by my worst-case-scenario calculations, $3000) on top of the several hundred that I think they’re ripping me off for the patch panel.

    For reference, how I arrived at the $3000. Spoilered out so you don't have to see it if you don't care.
    • I estimate 20 m per wire (house is less than 20 m long, only 5 m wide, patch panel is roughly in the middle on the lower of two floors, so the direct path is certainly much shorter than 20 m and I figured having enough to go the straight there and back should probably account for the distance travelled in the walls one way.)
    • 24 wires (it’s actually 22, but since the patch panel is 24 and I’m trying to overestimate everything…)
    • That’s a total of 480 m of wire
    • 300 m of wire costs about $300 from the first store I found. Let’s just grab 2 of those to get up to 600 m, comfortably over the estimate.
    • $600 in parts
    • There are 7 separate destinations. One of those destinations requires 8 separate wires so let’s count it as 2 destinations in case you can wire 4 to a destination in one go but 8 is too many. That’s 8 destinations.
    • $100/hr in labour
    • I have no idea how long it takes. Let’s say 3 hours per destination? That feels like an overestimate. (Plus a static 4 hours on top of that for the patch panel.)
    • $2400 in labour
    • $3000 for the cables, not including patch panel
    • $150 for the patch panel
    • $3150 total, round that up to $3,500, less than half of what they’re quoting and still probably a slight rip-off (but a rip-off on the scale I’d accept for the reasons you describe—just get it done, don’t stress, better to make sure it’s done right)

    So I’m looking at getting a different builder/electrician in to do this part of the job anyway and mainly wanted to know if there was something I didn’t understand about the patch panel in particular.