I wonder, if all of the hard-wired lighting (as opposed to table and floor lamps) uses LEDs, could it be on a 12V circuit? In fact, could all of the lighting be wired off one 15A or 20A breaker?
Watts used in a circuit - Amps times volts.
Thus a 12-volt circuit vs. a 120-volt circuit needs about 10 times the amperage! So that means much bigger wires, more copper, more expensive, and much harder to install (think of the 12-volt battery cables in your car). So it just isn’t practical.
If you postulate that LED lighting would use much less wattage, maybe. But then the infrastructure isn’t there to support it: they don’t make standard, code-legal house wiring in small gauge, there aren’t switches or connectors designed for 12-volt operation, there aren’t any standards for such connectors or wiring. All that would have to be developed; a pretty big, slow, & expensive process.
The whole point is that LED lights do use tremendously less wattage, as in 14W vs 100W for a similarly bright bulb. So house LED lighting could be run on 12V circuits with more or less the same amperage (and therefore wire size) as 120V incandescents.
Not that I think it makes a lot of sense to do that right now (if a real electrician disagrees, please speak up!) Mostly, why fuss around with two different voltages of wiring? That’s a recipe for exploding light bulbs somewhere down the line, or someone taking 12V precautions when working on a 120V circuit. And I don’t think there are a lot of 12V AC light fixtures around, anyway.
I suppose with built-in LED lighting (with bulbs hard-wired in, not sockets that you could but any kind of bulb in), you could put more of them on a single 120V circuit than you could with incandescents, but I don’t think that’s generally a limiting factor anyway.
The idea comes, in part, from noticing that “integrated LED” fixtures require a transformer to step down the 120V to 12V. So the track lighting in the living room might have one transformer for the track, the ceiling cans in the kitchen might have a transformer for each and so forth.
So instead, why not have one transformer for all of the ceiling lights in the house?
There absolutely are proposals for whole-house low voltage wiring.
The problem is there are half-dozen competing standards from a half-dozen competing manufacturers & industry groups. Each one protected by patents they intend to enforce vigorously so they can Rule ze Vorld of household wiring planet-wide.
The standards wars will run a few more years before somebody sufficiently [del]bribes[/del] persuades some major national standards agency to select their standard as THE standard.
As always, xkcd is on-point: xkcd: Standards
Its probably too late at this point but consider putting your washer and dryer on the same floor as your bedrooms. Just be sure that potential overflow/leaks are addressed with a catch tub or whatever its called. Have you ever considered an outside shower? I never shower indoors between June and October. Maybe its just a shore thing but I’d have one no matter where I moved to if I could. If not going with LEDs everywhere use them for under cabinet lighting. Its a nice touch and you can get them in various temperatures (colors).
The OP mentioned that the house will be one story and have no basement, so the washer/dryer will almost certainly be on the same level as the bedrooms.
Consider installing a safe/vault into the floor before the slab is poured.
It probably doesn’t apply to OP but, as an amateur radio operator, there are some hobby-specific things that are fun to think about. I’d want PVC vias for coax installed at least into the attic if not to the roof. A robust groundplane is a lot easier to bury 6 inches deep before the landscaping is put in. Might as well dig the hole, bend the rebar and pour the tower base while the cement mixer is around.
A lot of people in the tiny house movement wire their houses entirely in 12V DC. The stated reasons are that you don’t require an electrician to work on 12V and you don’t suffer from AC/DC conversion losses which is important if you’re running primarily from solar and battery banks. In a tiny house, you’re not doing long enough runs for losses to matter.
That’s exactly why I plan to wait a while before jumping into the smart home concept. I know from building PCs that there is ALWAYS something really cool coming out in the next six months, so you can’t keep delaying your purchase forever, but right now it seems that I have a better than even chance of buying something that will be incompatible or obsolete very shortly.
I used to have one, but the neighbors all signed a petition to make me stop.
Right. And I wouldn’t have a washer on an upstairs floor in any case. In fact, the house I’m living in now came with the laundry room on the third floor, and the first thing I did after buying it was convert a ground floor bedroom into a laundry room. The original laundry room is now a walk-in closet.
The original had a catch basin with a drain for the washer, but the drain was about the same diameter as a laundry tub drain. When my washer drains into a large laundry tub with an open drain, it takes about ten seconds for the water in it to be a foot high – the drain just can’t keep up. The rim on the basin for the washer was about two inches high.
I’m not sure what you mean by “anything,” but the plan is to use a heat pump for both heating and cooling. The climate is fairly mild where I’m building; only a few days below 30 in the winter or above 85 in the summer. If what I’ve read is correct, a heat pump in a mild climate is much cheaper to run than either gas or electric heat, although the upfront cost is higher. A geothermal heat pump would be even cheaper to run, but costs even more to install.
TILE - Get It, use it, do it right this time by all that is holy.
Go to any of the surviving 18th Cent “Union” station houses. Look at the tile. This is NOT a lost art as is the original Stained Glass - the ways to produce this surface have been in continous production for hundreds of years.
Use real stuff - the cheap imitation are exactly that - imitation. It will not produce the same result.
The ironies of building supplies continues - it used to be (get it?) that you had to look to find the stuff, but when you did, you got the good stuff. Now, the stuff is available behind large orange signs in every damed town but the quality is crap.
Back to finding the stuff,
The basics: sealant and moisture - much like baking food - time + materials results in a good install.
My last house I used reall stuff upstairs and the cheap stuff below.
After 20 years, the upstairs has never required grout cleaning - just the same cleaning on the grout (cement) and the tile.
The downstairs was built in 2008 and I have no idea how it has aged.
Those cheap, 8 MIL plastic “drop cloths” do serve one great purpose - they create the “OVEN” in which the water spray is added to the grout and allowed to sit. The clingy plastic wraps around the tile perfectly
Color me baffled.
You’re not the only one!
People have talked about outlets but let me add one more location for you.
Closets. Some building codes prohibit it, but if your area does not they’re excellent for charging hand held vacuums, charging center in the MB closet keeps devices off your nightstand but still close enough to reach if necessary, night lights etc.
I had them in my prior home but they’re against the law here and I miss several of them regularly. We used the MB closet charging station for a neat, out of the way place to recharge batteries for cameras and flashes, and the indirect dim light from a night light in a closet is the perfect balance for me of being able to see if I have to get up balanced with my need for almost total darkness to sleep.
Another possible location for an outlet; next to the toilet. This would be helpful in case you decide to get one of those Japanese toilet seat/bidets. (I think they’re available fo $500 or so, and I’ve heard good things about them but have never experienced one.)
Speaking of closets …
A couple houses ago I redid a good-sized walk-in with those fancy closet cabinets. I don’t remember if this https://www.californiaclosets.com/ was the brand, but it’s certainly the idea. Massively, massively wonderful. Unless you’re real short of stature you can get two levels of hanging clothes, shelves for lots of shoes, drawers and shelves galore, etc. Which massively reduces the number of dressers and such clogging up your room(s).
One of the extra-neat things we did was get a built-in ironing board which pulls out of what looks like a drawer. It’s a bit smaller than a full-sized one, but plenty big enough for ironing clothing. Like this, but IIRC not *quite *as expensive: http://www.rev-a-shelf.com/p-7-drawer-accessories-fold-out-ironing-board-for-bathroomvanity.aspx. Although the cabinets in those pix look about like what we had put in.
The $/SF of that room was scary, but the result was tres chic. And convenient as hell.
One of the harder things I had to do prepping for their install was to add an electrical outlet to the wall in the right place that it’d end up inside a cubby designed to hold the iron, starch spray, etc. Right directly above the drawer where the board pulled out. It was a wall with no power, so I had to tap into wiring in the attic and then run power down inside the wall. Which naturally was an exterior wall which is even more fun to retrofit. Putting in this outlet while the building was going up would have been trivial and costless.
In my current place I wrestle with a conventional ironing board and finding a nearby outlet to plug in an iron. How 1950s primitive and awkward and stupid it feels by comparison.