Structured Wiring: Use Your Home's Ethernet Jacks

Already have Ethernet jacks in your walls? Learn how to activate them with a PoE switch and wire a camera directly for LocalNanny.

You Might Already Be Wired

A lot of houses — especially those built after 2000 — have Ethernet jacks in the walls that nobody uses. They’re sitting behind furniture, painted over, or forgotten entirely. Maybe the builder ran Cat5e or Cat6 to every room but you’ve been on WiFi the whole time.

Those jacks all lead back to a structured wiring panel (sometimes called a media panel or wiring closet). It’s usually in a utility closet, garage, or basement — a metal or plastic box where all the cables from every room converge. If your house has one, you’re sitting on a goldmine for home networking.

Why This Matters for Baby Monitoring

Plugging a PoE camera directly into your home’s Ethernet wiring is the most reliable setup possible for LocalNanny:

  • Zero WiFi interference — Wired cameras don’t compete with your phones, laptops, and streaming devices
  • No signal drops — The video feed won’t stutter because someone microwaved popcorn
  • Power and data in one cable — PoE means no power adapter at the camera
  • Already in your walls — No new wiring to run, no holes to drill

If you have a jack in or near the nursery, you can have a rock-solid baby monitor running in under an hour.

What You Need

  • A PoE switch — Goes in your wiring closet, powers and connects your cameras (and anything else you plug in)
  • A PoE IP camera — We recommend the Amcrest 5MP PoE Camera
  • A short Ethernet patch cable — To connect the camera to the wall jack in the nursery
  • Your existing structured wiring — Cat5e or Cat6 cables already in the walls
  • An iPhone or iPad with LocalNanny installed

How It Connects

Office / Garage Wiring Closet Nursery WiFi In-wall Ethernet In-wall Ethernet iPhone Router PoE Switch Camera

Everything lives on your local network. The PoE switch in the wiring closet provides power and network to the camera through the Ethernet already in your walls. Your iPhone connects to the same router over WiFi.

Step-by-Step Setup

1. Find Your Wiring Panel

Look in your garage, basement, or a utility closet for a metal or plastic panel with a bunch of Ethernet cables bundled together. You might see a patch panel (a row of labeled jacks) or just loose cables with RJ45 connectors. The cables may be labeled with room names.

If you’re not sure which cable goes where, plug a device into the nursery wall jack and check which cable lights up at the panel — or use a simple cable tester.

2. Install the PoE Switch

Place your PoE switch in or near the wiring panel. Connect it to your router with a short Ethernet cable. Plug the switch into power.

If you have a patch panel, connect a short patch cable from the nursery’s port on the panel to a port on the PoE switch. If your structured wiring has bare RJ45 connectors, plug the nursery cable directly into the switch.

3. Connect the Camera

In the nursery, plug your PoE camera into the wall jack with a short Ethernet patch cable. The camera will power on within seconds — no power adapter needed. The PoE switch provides power over the same Ethernet cable.

4. Open LocalNanny

Open LocalNanny on your iPhone. Your camera should appear via auto-discovery. Tap to connect, enter the camera’s credentials, and you’re streaming.

Beyond Baby Monitoring: Modernize Your Home Network

Here’s the thing about getting a PoE switch set up in your wiring closet: once it’s there, you’ve just unlocked your entire home’s Ethernet wiring. A baby monitor camera is a great reason to start, but there’s a lot more you can do.

WiFi Access Points

This is the single biggest upgrade you can make to your home network. Instead of relying on one router to blast WiFi through walls and floors, you can run dedicated WiFi access points in different rooms — each one hardwired back to your PoE switch.

The difference is night and day. No more dead zones, no more buffering in the back bedroom, no more WiFi extenders creating their own problems. Every access point gets a clean, full-speed wired backhaul.

We strongly recommend Ubiquiti UniFi for this. UniFi APs are powered by PoE (so a single Ethernet cable is all you need per AP), deliver excellent WiFi performance, and the UniFi management software gives you a single dashboard to manage your whole network. They’re what we use and what we’d put in every home if we could. UniFi also makes great PoE switches and routers that pair perfectly with their access points — if you’re going all-in on upgrading your home network, the full UniFi stack is hard to beat.

PoE Security Cameras

Once you have one camera working for the nursery, adding more is trivial. Front door, backyard, garage — each one just needs an Ethernet cable back to the PoE switch. No power adapters, no WiFi configuration, no cloud subscriptions.

Other PoE Devices

The PoE ecosystem keeps growing. VoIP phones, smart home controllers, even some smart displays can run on PoE. You can even power a Raspberry Pi over PoE using a PoE HAT or a PoE splitter that outputs USB-C — great for running Home Assistant, Pi-hole, or other always-on services without a dedicated power adapter. Every device you move to wired PoE is one less thing on your WiFi and one less power adapter cluttering up an outlet.

What Kind of Cable Do I Have?

Check the printing on the jacket of the cables in your wiring panel:

Cable Type Speed Good Enough?
Cat5 100 Mbps Works, but limited
Cat5e 1 Gbps Great — most common in homes
Cat6 1–10 Gbps Excellent
Cat6a 10 Gbps Overkill for cameras, but nice to have

Cat5e is the most common in residential structured wiring and it’s more than enough for PoE cameras, access points, and general networking.

Tips

  • Label your cables — If your wiring panel isn’t labeled, take the time to figure out which cable goes to which room. Plug in a device and check, or use a cable tester. Label once, benefit forever.
  • Start small — You don’t need to light up every jack in the house on day one. Start with the nursery camera, then add access points and devices as you go.
  • Check your jack wiring — Some builders wired jacks for phone (2 pairs) instead of Ethernet (4 pairs). If a jack doesn’t work, pop the wall plate off and check. If the cable itself has all 4 pairs but the jack is only wired for 2, you can re-terminate it as an Ethernet jack (T568B standard). If the cable only has 2 pairs, it won’t work for PoE — you’d need to run a new cable.
  • PoE switch sizing — Get a switch with more ports than you think you need. It’s much cheaper to buy one bigger switch now than to replace it later. An 8-port or 16-port PoE switch covers most homes.
  • Power budget — PoE switches have a total power budget (measured in watts). Most PoE cameras only draw 3-5W each. Make sure your switch has enough total PoE budget for everything you plan to connect — but for cameras alone, even a modest switch will handle quite a few.
  • Consider a UPS — A small uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for your router, PoE switch, and modem keeps your network running during power outages. Your cameras stay on, your baby monitor keeps working, and your internet usually stays up too since most ISP equipment has its own battery backup. A basic UPS is cheap insurance for always-on monitoring.

PoE Switch:

  • 8-Port PoE Switch — Great for getting started, fits in most wiring panels
  • 16-Port PoE Switch — Think ahead: you’ll want at least one port per room and one per camera. A 16-port switch gives you room to grow without replacing hardware later

Cameras:

Ubiquiti UniFi:

  • Ubiquiti UniFi — Our top recommendation for access points, PoE switches, and routers. PoE-powered APs, excellent performance, and one dashboard to manage everything. Start with a U6+ or U7 Pro AP for each floor of your house.

See our full compatible cameras list for more camera options.