TV mounting, smart home and Wi-Fi in Clifton, NJ

Clifton is a large town with a lot of practical housing: two-family homes, postwar capes and colonials, garden apartments and newer townhouses, plus neighborhoods like Botany Village, Allwood and Athenia that each have their own feel. Many houses here have been in the same family for decades and have seen several rounds of renovation, so it is common to find a mix of plaster and drywall, older coax runs and phone jacks that nobody uses anymore.

That older cabling is often an opportunity. Unused phone or coax lines sometimes follow paths we can reuse to pull network cable to a bedroom office or living room TV, which avoids new holes. We also clean up what is no longer needed, removing dead splitters and abandoned boxes, and a small wall-mounted network panel in the basement or a utility closet gives the modem, router and switch one tidy, ventilated home instead of a pile of boxes behind the couch. Capes with finished upstairs rooms usually have knee-wall spaces behind them that make it easier to run wire for an upstairs access point or a mounted TV in a bedroom.

In two-family houses, the most frequent requests are separate internet for each floor, a doorbell camera that both households can use, and outdoor cameras covering the driveway and side yard. We set things up so the owner can see the shared areas while each unit keeps its own private network and devices. Smart locks on a shared side door also help when a tenant changes, since codes can be updated instead of rekeying. A camera over the shared driveway also helps settle questions about parking and deliveries without anyone having to guess.

Businesses along Main Avenue, Van Houten Avenue and the Route 3 and Route 46 corridors usually need reliable Wi-Fi for staff and customers, cameras over the register and doors, TVs for waiting rooms or menus, and background music. In Clifton, we schedule commercial work around business hours where possible and keep the system simple enough that whoever opens up in the morning can manage it.