djuk

A quick question for someone in the know which is probably very simple but just something I've not looked into before.

We have one telephone socket hallway downstairs on which we have a 'normal' wired telephone. I would quite like to add a couple of Panasonic cordless telephones in the two bedrooms upstairs and keep the wired phone downstairs.

Can anyone advise if this is possible or if the phones will need to be configured in a different setup.

Never had cordless phones before so a tad confused on how this all works

Cheers

David

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

I've dabbled with phone lines in the past, normally resulting in a loss of service

I think what you have to do is quite simple really. You just need a splitter to attach to the socket downstairs. To this you will attach your normal telephone, and then the base stations of the cordless phones.

There are a few things to look out for:-
1) If you only use the socket downstairs, then without trailing any wires around the house, all of the base stations are going to be downstairs. Depending on the phones, sizes and construction of your house, you may find that there are dead spots around the house where the cordless phones will not work
2) Phones have a rating, I think it is the REN rating, not sure on this. Basically your phone line can support only a certain REN rating, lets say 10. Different phones are more/less efficient than others. So you may only be able to connect 2 phones before you run out of power (remember the phone line powers most phones). You will have to check these ratings and make sure you do not overload the line. If you do, you will notice that some of the phones may ring some of the time, and not others. The line may also be lost mid call, etc etc. We had loads of fun when we tried to attach 7 phones to one line.
3) Old cordless phones are very easy to listen into. You can turn your normaly kitchen radio into them (by accident) and then listen into someone elses converstaion. Ie, your neighbours may end up hearing you bitch about them.... Newer phones have some sort of encryption to stop this, you want this really.

carl

What you need is a single base station with a pair of DECT phones. Argos sell this sort of stuff pretty cheap.

Do you have telephone sockets upstairs at all? If not, you'll either need to run an extension cord upstairs, or keep the base station downstairs and the handsets upstairs. The second handset will probably come with a non-basestation charger, so you could have that upstairs, charging either handset from it when necessary.

Simes777

The REN is the Ring Equivelence Number - the max is around 4. This means that you can plug in 4 phones of an REN of 1 or only 3 phones if one has an REN of 1.5 and another of REN 1. Bit optimistic to go for 7 though Luminous

Does depend on the line quality and distance from the telephone exchange though.

Cheers

Simes

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Yes, optimistic was a word someone else used...... namely the telephone engineer that had to come out to sort it. I did try and tell my housemates that 100 metres of exension from a single phone point was never going to work.

Got it fixed in the end though, way to go BT

carl

The REN is to do with taking power out of the phone line (like a normal phone). A base station is powered from the mains, so only has a REN of 1. Regardless of how many cordless phones connect to it, it still has a REN of 1.