I’m going to be hooking up some PoE cameras to HA and installing them to the eaves on my roof. The easiest route from my ground floor office to the loft is via a boarded off box culumn that runs top to bottom of the house internally.
Now inside this column is a mixture of heating and gas pipes. Some hot and some cold. I can get a cat6 cable up there no problem but should I run it through conduit to be safe?
It would have to be flexible pipe style conduit due to space limitations or would running the cables alone be fine?
Running through conduit is always a good idea, even if just for maintenance work later on (replacing the cable) and general protection against the elements / UV / rodents.
In terms of safety running along water pipes, hot or cold, should not be a problem. There are typically requirements in terms of distance to gas pipes and combustion exhaust pipes though (look up your local code). Also do not run Cat5/6 close to power cables, especially in parallel.
It’s another possible point of failure and it may be at a highly inaccessible location and possibly exposed to moisture, dirt, etc. If I had to do this personally, I would also try to avoid adding another switch if I could.
That said, this little gem here (Netgear GS105PE), a PoE passthrough switch (the switch itself is also powered by PoE, so no external power required at all, all Cat6) has saved my butt before
