This took months and several false starts. Most of what I learned was not about networking — it was about getting cable from one room to another.
Why any of this happened
I was gifted four UniFi G3 Bullets and a CloudKey+, and later three AP AC access points. One of the cameras was dead on arrival.
PoE cameras need wired connections, and there was no wiring where I needed it.
The first attempt
I used an old Netgear range extender in downlink mode: pull Wi-Fi from the basement, hand it out as LAN, into a five-port PoE injector, and power the cameras from that.
The cameras came up. Nothing else about it worked. Anything behind the extender saw about 20 Mbps down, and the feeds were unreliable.
Running the cable
This is the part that took the time, and the part I had never done before.
Everything lands at a four-port Ethernet jack at the router. Four runs leave it:
| Run | Route | Feeds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Into the ceiling, through the floor, to a closet | Access point |
| 2 | Into the ceiling, through the floor, to a closet | Front door G6 |
| 3 | Into the ceiling, through the trusses, down a wall | My computer |
| 4 | Up through the wall | Basement AP |
Runs 1 and 2 are the PoE pair and take the same path: up into the ceiling, through the floor above, and out into an upstairs closet, where another two jacks terminate them for the access point and the front door camera.
Run 4 is short - from the bottom of the wall to the top of the wall. Just enough to get the AP into free space and hide the wire.
Every run that doesn’t plug directly into a stationary appliance, i.e. AP or PoE camera, is terminated into an Ethernet jack in an old-work box rather than left as loose cable.
What I learned doing it:
- What is and is not possible in a given wall or ceiling
- How to terminate cable
- How to think about a run before starting it
- Ethernet cable standards
- The advantages of fish tape, and just how much you can get done by wiggling it through a tight space.
Getting bandwidth to the patio
This was the hardest problem, and the one I came closest to paying to solve. I got quotes for having cable run out there.
What made those unnecessary was a feature I had not seen described much: the AP AC on the patio takes its uplink over mesh, then hands out wired Ethernet from its own port. That feeds the patio PoE switch, which powers the cameras.
It delivers a few hundred Mbps, using hardware that was a fraction of the price, without cutting holes in my soffit.
The patio switch is weatherproofed under a small wooden overhang I built for it.
The rest of the rebuild
- The main router became a Cloud Gateway Ultra.
- A five-port PoE switch at the router powers the CloudKey+, two access points, and the camera on the direct run.
- The cameras settled at a G6 as the workhorse for the patio, supplemented by two of the G3s, plus the G6 at the front door.
Where it landed
- 300-500 Mbps Wi-Fi through the house, and real coverage outside
- Stable camera feeds, which was the original point
- UniFi security policies, including blocking internet access for every Home Assistant connected entity — they reach HA and nothing else
- A hardwired basement PC, which I had not set out to get
- Cable terminated properly at both ends of every run
No photographs of this one, deliberately.
What I would do differently
This was a long project with many chances to improve. The biggest error was thinking I could install old UniFi gear without falling into a rabbit hole. What started as a small gift turned into many hundreds of dollars of new kit and hours of cable runs. Oh, and I also killed a cheap cable tester. Note to self: they don’t take kindly to being plugged into a PoE cable. The upstairs AP faces directly at a wall, which cuts signal fast. I may 3D print an angled mount to face it deeper into the core of the house. Mostly, everything is as expected with the “final” configuration.