Effects of Cellotex on audio visual signals

[gwernybwch]

I'm in the process of renovating a house and have just finished off putting foil faced insulation board (Cellotex) under all of the rafters in the attic.

I was planning to put my satellite multi-switch and terrestrial TV booster / distributor in the attic and cable running across the attic, although it has since crossed my mind, what effect - if any - would all this foil have on my TV / radio / wifi / mobile signals?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

 

[OwainDIYer]

Provided your dish and aerials are outside the attic, the insulation will have no effect.

In fact any effect might be beneficial as it would screen out interference.

 

[Lucid]

Of the signals you mentioned then the mobile signal might be the one to drop a bit. Wi-Fi would be affected if you had insulated the walls.

As OwainDIYer suggests, so long as the aerials are outside then TV shouldn't be affected. The sat dish will have to be outside of course, but that signal shouldn't be affected either.

 

[gwernybwch]

Thanks for the replies.

Provided your dish and aerials are outside the attic, the insulation will have no effect.

In fact any effect might be beneficial as it would screen out interference.

I was thinking more about the cables and the multi-switch, they would be a couple of mm away from foil on the insulation. Would this have any effect?

Of the signals you mentioned then the mobile signal might be the one to drop a bit. Wi-Fi would be affected if you had insulated the walls.

When you saw 'insulated the walls', do you mean insulated the walls with foil faced insulation or insulation with mineral fibres?

The reason that I ask is that I might also be insulating the internal walls as well and was thinking of using Celotex / insulated plasterboard for that as well.

 

[Lucid]

I've done quite a few installs in new builds and major refurbs. It's common now to find the walls foil lined for insulation. It does knock lumps off the Wi-Fi signal strength. You should really think about running some network cable. It's cheaper than trying to struggle by with sticking plaster solutions such as Wi-Fi repeaters or, (shudder) Powerline adapters.

There's a few other things about Wi-Fi that get overlooked.

It runs at the lowest common denominator speed, so your new whizzy laptop is held back by the wireless Blu-ray player for example. I have anecdotal evidence that suggest some devices hog the available bandwidth; iPads have been mentioned to me on a few occasions. Very few routers treat Wireless-G and Wireless-N individually. This means you lose any speed advantage because all the signals are routed through the same "turnstyle". Real world wireless speeds are never what's advertised; distance, interference and just the network overheads from encoding/decoding WEP/WPA and the error correction all take their toll.

Ethernet cable with a network switch has none of those issues. Gigabit traffic coexists with 10/100 quite happily. You get the full network bandwidth at each port. It's also more secure.

You can still use wireless for those devices where it's the only practical solution of course. Also, using wired for some devices means that some of the bottleneck on wireless networking is lifted. You can also hang wireless access points off the in-room wired network and so improve wireless performance and cure dead spots.

If you're on a really tight budget then Cat5e will support up to Gigabit speeds on relatively short distances (< 50~100m). CAT6 is where it's at now though. The price difference isn't huge on a 305m reel. Just make sure you are buying pure copper rather than copper coated aluminium or steel.

 

[Monkeh]

If you're on a really tight budget then Cat5e will support up to Gigabit speeds on relatively short distances (< 50~100m).

Cat5e will support gigabit up to exactly the same range as Cat6: 100m.

 

[gwernybwch]

If you're on a really tight budget then Cat5e will support up to Gigabit speeds on relatively short distances (< 50~100m). CAT6 is where it's at now though. The price difference isn't huge on a 305m reel. Just make sure you are buying pure copper rather than copper coated aluminium or steel.

Thanks for the reply. I've already bought a reel of Cat6 cable to run a network across the house. My next job was to buy and fit the installation in the stud walls and the ceiling joists. I'll defo be fitting fibre slabs there now.

Cheers!

 

[Corazones]

I have just fitted some ceiling speakers very tightly into a Cellotex-insulated vaulted roof ceiling, and I was worried that this might affect the audio quality (I hasten to add that I made sure the insulation thickness wasn't affected!); I am pleased to say it had no detrimental effect on the sound. Another pair of speakers went into an internal ceiling which was criss-crossed with mains cables; in this case I worried about mains hum, but in fact no problem.