RE: A newbie builds a house

["Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Steve,

The one glaring thing is the number of CAT5 lines you're thinking about.
I would recommend a _minimum_ of 8 CAT5 points per room. The marginal
cost of adding extra CAT5 points at time of first-fix electrics is very
low. The likelyhood of running out at some point within the first two
years is very high, and the cost of retro-fitting once the decorating is
done is also high.

8 may seem like a lot, but consider the following scenario. The issue is
not whether you think you'll want to do them NOW, but how little you
have to invest NOW to make it possible if you do decide to go that route
LATER, compared to how much it would cost to retrofit later!

- PC (maybe you don't want a PC in your guest bedroom today, but are you
sure you'll never want to provide your visiting cousins from the States
with a web browser in their room?)

- Laptop plug-in point on your home network connected to the Internet
(again, you didn't know you needed to do this, until you were in the
kitchen, trying to remember what temperature to set the oven for a creme
brulee, and realised that the best place to find out was the Internet -
maybe you don't have the laptop yet.)

- Networked MP3 player (trust me, once you've got it, you won't want to
give it up, and you'll want more.)

- Whole-house audio/video distribution over CAT 5, (so you can carry on
watching that DVD even though you go into the conservatory.)

- Infrared control over CAT5 (so you can pause that DVD you were
watching in the conservatory)

- Phone extension plugged into a "baby" switchboard, run into
your ISDN
line. (Don't see the point of having indepedant phone lines in your
house - wait till you have teenagers!)

- 2 more for reasons that we haven't thought about yet but, heh, I'd
only thought about PCs when I first went to wire my house with CAT5!

I said 8 - ideally 16 (thus giving a set of 4 in each corner, so you
have flexibility about _where_ each device can go within a room!)

Regards,

Mark Harrison
Head of Systems, eKingfisher


-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Clark [mailto:steev@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 22 August 2001 22:53
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] A newbie builds a house


[...]
After several years of talking and thinking about it, it finally
looks like we're going to be building our house by the end of the
year. It's going to be a 3 bed timber frame on our existing large
plot in Bedfordshire.

All along I've assumed we were going to be wiring for most
eventualities. I like my computers, so there will be CAT5 to every
room (at least 2 lines) and probably coax as well for the video.
Having played with the likes of SnapStream I can imagine using PCs
for distributed video as well as MP3 and internet.
[...]