Re: New Home Construction

["pebrinic@xxxxxxxxx" <pebrinic@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the responses! Marc, as far as budget, the house is 1500
sqft total divided into 4 floors.  I am trying to get the system in
place for about 15k could go as high as 20 if it was worth it.  My
highest priority is to get the right kind of cabling intrafstructure in
places, so if the cost of the electronics comes too high, I may just go
for a 2 or 4 zone system initially and then upgrade the electronics as
needed.

I _definitely_ will have everything conduit-run with pull-lines.  So,
hopefully, I will never have to fish cables behind the wall without
them.

I am looking for recommendations both for the electronics-side in the
distribution closet and for the wiring.

I am sure that I would like to pipe HD video to at least two rooms (as
many as 6 would be great in the future).  I have seen a variety of
distribution methods for HD, some use converters to run DVI/HDMI over
twisted pair ethernet, some actually use a swtiched IP-based network.
It seems to me that the best way for me to handle it would just to run
3-4 drops of cat 5e or cat 6 to each room where i would like video?
That would give me the flexibility of using any converters at each end
and hopefully build a completely IP-based system.  Do you guys have any
recommendations for IP-based video systems that will get HD quality or
is that still not very mature?

Dave and speeder, I liked your idea about firewire over ethernet,
insteresting!  Do you guys find that a lot of home use that for their
electronics systems?  Also, is that enough bandwidth for HD?  Also, as
far as interference is concerned, is a powerline firewall such as the
Compose PLC a necessity in a townhouse enviroment?  That would be more
a question for the automation system that we would install, if that
would go over powerlines such as X10, right?

Sorry, for all the questions, I am pretty new with a lot of this, seems
very interesting, but also very confusing!  Thanks for all your
responses!!

-Paul