Re: About to build house, advice needed.

[RickH <passport@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 21, 1:48 pm, John <warner....@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi, all.
>
> I've been researching a lot and reading this group's archives.
> I'm about to build a house and want to wire it up to "the nine's"
> I'm looking at whole house audio, distributed ir and video, alarm
> system, outdoor audio, x10 or insteon, and anything else you guys can
> think of.
>
> My thoughts currently are HAI Hi-Fi for the whole house audio, 2
> cat6/2 rg-6 to each room.
> I'm kind of lost at all the options.  Power catches on the doors?
> Outdoor video surveillance? HAL 2000 voice control?
> I don't have to use all the options right now, just need to know how
> best to wire it to help me install this stuff in the future.
>
> All help appreciated.  Thanks.
>
> John

I wouldn't get bogged down on all the minute details of you can do at
this point, especially voice control.  But concenrate on wire paths
throughout the home instead.  So before the insulators and drywallers
get there you need to get some buddies and wire/conduit it up.  Or
better yet home run 1.25 or 1.5 inch plastic conduit from termination
room to a point near the floor in each room, from those points run 1
inch plastic conduit to wall switchs, speaker jacks, phone jack
locations.  Then let them drywall it up.  Then when you move in just
pull the wire yourself, thats what I did.  And I have not even
bothered to wire all the rooms yet based on lifestyle, but if I need
to all I have to do is pull/push the wire down to the basement
termination room.  Last week I wanted another network jack in my wifes
office for a fax, and it took all of 15 minutes to drop another cat5
to the basement and install the jack, I dred how long it would have
taken to get the wire from the second story over the garage all the
way down to the basement without conduit.  With good open wire paths
you can do anything you want later.  Choose a central termination room
first and hopefully you will be able to figure out everything while
the carpenters are framing and you can actually see the passages/
blockages for wiring.  If you want you can put in the dual runs of
rg6qs and 3 runs of cat5 (voice, data, wallswitch) without conduit,
but install conduit along those paths anyway for other wires in the
future.  Also consider pre-wiring the motion sensors so you wont have
to use wireless ones, speakers, cameras (use wire with coax and power
piggybacked for cameras).  Getting caught up in anything other than
having good accessable wiring paths at this point like software,
brands, etc is jumping the gun.  By accessable I mean having access
panels, conduit, or whatever is needed to make new wire easier to
install later as well as the pre-wire/conduit being installed before
the drywall goes up.