A neat solution for selfbuilders...

["Mark Harrison (Groups)" <mph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, we went up to see the "almost finished" selfbuild
of
another list member. Apart from the obvious suspects - central vacuum,
underfloor heating, CAT5 floodwiring, whole house scene lighting, whole
house forced air cooling/heating, in-ceiling speakers, etc.etc.etc....
there was one really neat idea.

I'm hiding the name of the guilty party, since I don't believe he's
mentioned this stuff he came up with directly, and suspect that he's
overly modest.

The neat idea was the layout of the "Node zero". This is a space
a
little larger than an equipment rack, that contains, well an equipment
rack.

Huh - node zeros are hardly new ideas.

The clever bit was the door... or doors... there were two of them.

One, which opened into the lounge, gave access to the front of the rack,
for patching cable, configuring stuff, etc.

The other, which opened into another room (an office?) gave access to
the back of the rack, for punching down cable, access to the plugs,
cables that get plugged into the back of equipment.


This struck me as so cool, you wouldn't believe it. We'd been looking at
racks on castors, racks on slides that pulled forwards, even racks on
pivots that swung round...

... but the simple solution of having TWO DOORS onto a room that was
only 2' square was something that had never occurred to me.

Our house plans are being redrawn this week :-)


Mark