Wiring a home under construction - what do I really need these days?

Factual Questions
1

Building a new home (yay me for supporting the economy) that is now framed, roof on, and putting in the furnace to dry it out so we can go to town on the interior. We have a contractor with a base package of stuff that we can then upgrade.

The wiring guy was in and trying his best to upsell me on old technology. No, I don’t need a phone line. I’m not convinced I need to hardwire every room in the house for Cat5, Cat6, Coax because “wireless” can have problems.

I’m appealing to the Doper community to see if you have experience to share or can recommend a way forward.

  1. I would like to set up a PC/home server as my command center
  2. good wireless throughout a 3500 sq ft 2 story house
  3. To start with comcast TV but I want to get rid of those parasites soon. I’d like to have just 1-2 TVs hooked up to cable. I’m pretty sure there will be decent internet TV pretty soon. We don’t watch much TV.
  4. Maybe I need an alarm system. Not sure. The house will come wired for the ground floor but an alarm itself is an upgrade. The main reason for an alarm is to track if my daughter on the autism spectrum gets out.
  5. Maybe I want to put speakers in a couple of rooms and be able to play music or internet radio
  6. My daughter on the autism spectrum gets her bedroom door wired. But I think we could just wire the door to a simple hardwired alarm that would wake me up at night if she goes walkabout
  7. For smoke dectectors (and whatever else is required by code), I think I want it hard wired instead of part of the alarm system (which we may not install).

What I’m really trying to figure out is how to have a centralized PC “control center” (bonus points for being able to access remotely via internet like with my smart phone), and the various things/services I could hook it up to from a practical point of view. Does something along these lines exist?

thanks in advance

2

I’m partial to the Insteon system myself, with an ISY series master controller. It’s mainly for lighting, but you can do A/V, thermostats, close switches or sense voltage or contact closure (think seeing if you left your garage door open while at work, and if so closing it. Insteon is designed for retrofit so the only precaution you need to make in a new house if interested is to make sure the electrician runs a neutral to every light switch location you might want to control.

3

No particular need for telephone lines, but why not put in Cat 5e everywhere? The WiFi spectrum is crowded, and if you have a lot of neighbors, your speed can suffer. At a very minimum, having extra Cat 5e lines means you can put in extra WiFi access points. You can get around the phone lines by using the extra wires in the Cat 5e at phone lines, and RG-6 coax is a dying tech. But personally, it makes no sense not to put in at least one Cat 5e per major room. And I’d pair that with an RG-6 coax just to keep my options open and ward off the evil cable guys drilling holes in the side of your nice new house.

4

I’m with gaffa, we built our house in 2008 and we hardwired Cat5 cables into several rooms where we anticipated having computers. Also we put one in our entertainment center because the TiVo seems to do a lot better on the wired connection. One thing I wish we had done differently was to have a ‘control center’ on the main floor. We had all of our Cat 5 wiring pulled to the far side of our unfinished basement. That means I have to put my router down there and a wireless access point in a more central location in the house.

5

if you want to have the most options then run conduit between major rooms. you can then run fiber optics or any new technology as you want.

a house that size you may have problem locations with wireless. having major rooms wired with cat5 or cat6 wiring allows you to extend your wireless as needed.

smoke/CO alarms are networked over power lines with 3 conductor power wiring. these should all be on their own circuit breaker and wired with 3 wire power cable. this is a simple robust system that you can count on to give you the couple minutes you might have to escape.

6

Well, I think it depends on the cost of doing all these things. Keep in mind that you can use power line adapters and coax adapters in place of ethernet wiring as well. But at minimum, I would have at least one ethernet outlet on every floor.

I would also opt for the alarm, though that can be wireless, so no need to run wiring for that beyond where the panel and brains are. Lastly, for the pc control. There are plenty of controllers like home seer and the vera line that will automate any compatible system you have. I wouldnstick with one technology though (eg. Z wave, insteon). It will work with any of them, but I hear intermingling them can be a bitch.

7

Some thoughts…

I built my new house in 2007 and the thng I regret is that we did not put enough ethernet drops in the house. Plus, wherever your 3rd bedroom will likely be the office / computer room, there are never enough power outlets. Look carefully at the room layout, imagine where you would put desks, TVs, etc and put the outlets there. We made sure that the power outlets in the master bedroom would line up with the bedside tables rather than being hidden behind the headboard. We also put an alarm control console by the bed in the master bedroom so we don’t have to walk to the front door to turn on the night alarm.

(I also regret the IDIOTS who did teh wiring for minimum wage, after they charged me a bundle. I find stupid stuff like a RJ11 socket at one location instead of RJ45.)

But yes, you are far better off being able to hook everything together wired. Cat5e or Cat6. So far, there is still no simple standard for room-to-room distribution of HDTV, the way there is for cable TV. If I had to guess, Ethernet cabling will be the way to go. So have a drop wherever you put a TV, wherever you put a phone. There is long-distance HDMI, but I suspect it will be replaced by some sort of streaming; besides, in 2007 multiple 50-foot HDMI cables would cost more than all the wiring put together. You could instead use a Slingbox and ethernet. Heck, nowadays your Bluray, game console, TV istself, and probably one or two other devices are ethernet-pluggable. You’ll probably end up with an ethernet switch just for the electronics area…

Wifif is great, but if you play with an iPhone, you will probably find a minimum of 5 to 10 wifi networks visible in any residential neighbourhood point. Do you want to rely on that crowded a spectrum for HD streaming.

Of course, we also had the security system wired, so that window and door sensors and motion detectors in key spots cover the house. In some places, an alarm system monitored by a security company is almost a given.

A luxury we splurged on too, was a sound system. We have ceiling speakers for surround in the living room and rec room. Our layout is such that there was only one logical spot for the TV. The location of the audience/sofa means we could not mount the rear speakers in/on a wall. It’s great that there are no rear speaker wires or outlets, just 3 ceiling grills. The spot for the flat screen TV is also on the wall, with cables in the wall to the electronics niche and speakers mounted in the wall beside the TV, and a wall plate in the corner from the electronics niche for the subwoofer.

We even made sure to have an outlet for power and TV (and ethernet) high up on the wall of the master bedroom to wall-mount a flat-screen TV with no cables showing. Heck, you can do anything before the drywall goes on, it’s a LOT cheaper than doing it 5 years from now…

The Marantz tuners have a “second room” option, where a second output (i.e. radio tuned to specific station) feeds down to a cenral location that allows us to listen to it anywhere in the house - Speakercraft MZC-66 with 6 zones, speaker and controls, including the ability to listen to what’s playing on the livingroom TV anywhere in the house. Oh, and I plugged an Airport station in to the unit, so one of my input choices is music streamed via iTunes from my PC, iPad, or iPhone. The aforementioned BOZOs never go around to installing a functional IR input, otherwise you could also do things like control a tuner, etc. from any control station.

Our tax is based on finished area; the electrician said if we put too many outlets in the unfinished area of the basement, it would be counted as finished by the city. (“you have everything there, you’re just waiting for the inspection to be done an you’ll probably put on the drywall!”) So I regret that it will be a major effor to wire the unfinished half of the basement. I wonder if I could have had the wires pulled into the insulated walls, even if they were not terminated with outlet boxes or tied into the lectrical panel…

8

If RG-6 is a dying technology, how do you feed the signal to cable boxes and TVs? Doesn’t that still require coax?

9

Worse than that - we also have wired for satellite TV (big in Canada). So we have wires from a good dish location discreetly between us and the neighbour house, into the basement, where there is a coax crossover for the cabling to feed 2 different satellite receivers. The hard part, the aforementioned Bozo’s had to go back and put a third coax cable to the living room.

I don’t see what was so hard to understand. Bell Expressvu TV receivers require 2 different coax feeds from the antenna LNAs to get all the channels. Then we needed a third coax TV cable running from the receiver back to the cetral distribution point, where we have an TV UHF amplifier (necessary!) to distribute the resulting signal to the TVs in the rest of the house, also via coax. The satellite receiver needs to be next to the living room TV so that at least that one has HD service. However, we can watch and control the livingroom PVR from anywhere in the house, watch over ch 73 and control with radio-signal remote.

Yes, we still use coaxial (RG6) to distribute the satellite output for tuner 2 (ch 73 and tuner 1 (ch 75). HDTV distribution around the house is still not an established technology, and the satellite feed is preferrable to the cable service, which still would I assume need coax and a set-top box in every room.

So yes, you still want to put RG6 or RG58(?) coax to all possible TV locations; probably from a central basement source where you can locate a UHF cable amplifier.

10

Makes a lot of sense to me. Code limits the number of power conductors in a given size of conduit and I am not sure you want or are allowed signal and power in the same conduit.

It is fairly cheap and easy to run wires in an unfinished house. Do it.

Also consider http://www.brickwall.com/ whole house protection. A disconnect interlock to allow a generator too while you are at it.

11

i wa speaking of empty conduit for signal and data cables.

you don’t want to mix power and data cables in the same conduit. it is a hazard.

12

What I did for low voltage stuff when remodeling my house was run 3/4" “blue pipe” which is flexible plastic conduit from every room to the utility room. So I can run any technology to any room at any time.

13

Of course, if it’s a 1-floor house with the basement ceiling unfinished, it would be trivial to run almost anything.
BTW - before the drywall goes on, go through the whole house with a digital camera and get pics of inside of all the walls, interior and exteror. I found that invaluable when I needed to put in a medicine cabinet and wanted to be sure before I cut a hole in the drywall that the vent stack for the plumbing, or some electrical wire, was not in my way. It will sure help when it`s time for alterations or repairs to know exactly what pipe goes where, what wire goes where.

14

Good advice

15

No. Code requires that wires have to be terminated in an approved box (even if no outlets, just a blank cover). Possibly might be allowed if not connected back at the panel. But how would you find them again, behind the finished wall?

16

Absolutely not. Besides being unsafe & a code violation, the power lines would really mess up the signals in the signal lines.

Power lines are run through metal conduit, flexible metal conduit, or EMT (thin-wall metal conduit) in homes. Or no conduit at all, just NM (‘romex’) plastic cable.

Signal wires are run through flexible plastic ‘conduit’, usually blue, like this. That’s what was being suggested. A

And I would agree with that suggestion. Put in runs of this blue signal conduit from each room to the likely location of your master panel for phone, ethernet, cable TV, whole-house sound, etc. That’s easy and pretty cheap to do now, when the house is being built. And it will be worth it the first time you want to add or upgrade some system in your house!

17

http://www.monoprice.com/

Recommend these guys for all your interconnection needs; cables, jacks, wall outlets, plates, speaker connections, etc…
Excellent pricing and quick service.

18

I definitely suggest conduit. You can build everything for the technology you have now, but conduit will work for the technology you have next year.

I sure wish I had it. My house wasn’t wired for anything except cable so I made a cabinet in the laundry room, ran my cable in there and put the modem, router, a couple small servers, NAS drives and home automation stuff in the cabinet then ran cat5 to all rooms. I use wireless but a cat5 hardwire is always better than wireless for things that aren’t mobile. I even ran a 50ft rca cable to stream media to an old school non-HiDef tv in the garage. I never thought I’d do that, but it was either $10 for rca cable or a new TV for a location where I barely use it.

Remote PC access can be done. I don’t suppose you use Linux by any chance do you? Everything I have is Linux based and I can control it all from my phone using ssh on the backend. I’m sure there are programs for windows/mac.

And ditto the monoprice.com suggestion, don’t even think of buying this stuff offline, it will be 3x more expensive. You’ll probably want to get familiar with keystone jacks, they’re cheaper than buying a dedicated wall plate for whatever cable you’re using.

19

I did this on a remodel and wish I had used larger conduit because I need to pull 3 speaker wires, USB and HDMI through it. (RG-6 and Cat5 go separately but are not enough.)

20

I’m no help on the internet/phone stuff, but I would suggest going ahead and doing the alarm. We had an alarm installed in an existing house, and it was really cheap–seems like it would be cheaper/easier in a house being built. We got glass breaks in every room upstairs and window openers in one room (because it’s over the one-story sunroom, so it’s possible for someone to climb up there).