Is there any problem with insulating interior walls? Because I could see the value of doing that for sound insulation, particularly those half-bath/powder rooms just off the foyer. (Who wants to hear noises from in there while you’re talking quietly in the living room?) And for the bedrooms, it might be nice if someone wants to sleep in.
(Not that I’m building a house myself but I like to think about what I’d do if I ever do.)
My best advice is, estimate how many power outlets you need, and then quadruple it. And then double that!
Conduit, absolutely. When we remodeled the bottom floor and finished the basement, our contractor ran the blue conduit (smurf tube) through the new construction. Those ANR now the only rooms where everything thing works the way we want.
Also, get the pictures of the walls before the Sheetrock goes up. That will eliminate a lot of head scratching down the road.
there are acoustic insulating products for interior walls that is different from thermal insulation.
Is the number of outlets on a circuit breaker limited by the size of the breaker?
I dunno, if it is the OP should get more breakers too.
Like many homes my kitchen is the most lived in room. Along one counter there is an outlet strip with 12 outlets in about 6’. This has its own run to the breaker panel.
It sits about 10" above the counter and is right behind the seating area.
All phone and camera chargers, a bread machine, coffee maker, a laptop brick and various things are plugged in here.
It’s the best. If it were 20 outlets they would all get used.
I remember the non-industrial looking ones weren’t cheap but it was definitely worth it.
Video before drywall is a super idea.
Cool.
I’d rather have accurate architectural drawings, amended after the contractor’s winos and street people nailed the studs in.
Not in residential.
I run cat5e and coax to all bedrooms and locations that may be used for tv or computers. The wiring costs of low voltage are negligible against the cost of the the electrical wiring.
It is completely worth it to do on new construction.
Yes the technology may change and there may be other wireless options but cat5e and coax have been used for many years now and have proven reliability. Nothing is sweeping them to complete obsolescence anytime soon.
You can run conduits instead but that will be extremely expensive in comparison.
He is right, stop ignoring him.
about once a month I am at someones house who cant figure out why the internet doesent work in one room or drops off every couple hours for no apparent reason but only in some areas. Usually, its a larger house and the signal is trying to get through 4 walls and a kitchen full of big heavy stainless steel appliances is in between.
Also Cat6 can easily handle gigabit speeds vs. 100-150mb for wireless. Short of someone popping a nuke in the area your hardwired connections will work. Wireless stuff can have a variety of forms of interference.
Hardwired is more reliable, and faster. You have a good cabling guy giving you good advice.
Yup, just chiming to support the concensus. Pull lots of UTP. Might as well use CAT6 as it costs almost no more then CAT5, and is going to be good for a very long time. The only thing that can compete is fibre, and that has a host of problems. You can reticulate just about enything over UTP. There are adaptors for HDMI, audio, you can power things over it, and there is so much of it all over commercial buildings that there is a very large incentive to keep it as the basis for ongoing technologies. Drag as much as you can all over the house, back to a central point. Drag a pair everywhere. That way you have the ability to run a network on one, and whatever else needs feeding with the other. The stuff is so cheap it just doesn’t matter. I even ran a length for my doorbell. But putting it in after the fact can be awful.
WiFi is not the next thing, it is very likely to become a niche thing. It has all sorts of problems. Sharing your digital lifestyle’s bandwidth with every noisemaking piece of junk owned by you and your neighbours is not going to be happy.
On outlets on a breaker.
I have not read code, but I have heard of inspectors assigning a certain average amperage per outlet and claiming the circuit was over loaded. That leaves me wondering about my one circuit with 16 outlets. It starts over my work bench where I have a nest of 8. When working on a project, I may have the overhead light, the drill sharpener, Dremel, electric drill, recip saw, and welder plugged in. It was a convenient circuit to pick up some other things too, mostly outlets I might plug a tool in while I using it. I don’t have enough hands to drill, saw, and weld at the same time. Nor long enough arms to reach something plugged into the outside outlet. It is wired up with #10 and has a 20 amp breaker.
Seriously?
We had trouble getting “as installed” drawings (accurate) on industrial projects. The only thing the electrician and contractor worry about is whether the outlet boxes are near where they should be. If you don’t specify locations for outlet boxes, they will put them in random places that meet code. (In our area, IIRC, spaced every 10 feet from arbitrary starting points.) If you are really lucky, your power panel will be labelled by breaker, better than 5 breakers labelled “bedroom”. Cabling will be better labelled only if someone has to set something up after that.
These guys are pulling a dozen wires that all end up in a lump. Then, they terminate them all. Unless they have to label them, they won’t. If you want to pay an electrician or cable guy an extra few hours/days at contractor rate, he will label and draw them outon a plan too. However, the position of every stud is NEVER marked on a lan in my experience, and much wiring relies on stud placement for boxes. With my house, we did a walkthrough with the electrician and cable people when the interior stud were up, and they marked outlets points etc. with magic marker.
You are better off doing your own map of breakers/outlets when you move in.
There’s no national limit on outlets per breaker for residential work
Some local codes apply the national limit for commercial work of 10 per 15 amp and 13 per 20 amp to residential work.
When I rewired my house, I to the extent practical seperated lighting fixtures and receptacles into different circuits, put all receptacles on GFCIs, and strung a seperate 20 amp circuit for the receptacles for each room. Romex is cheap compared to a house so might as well do it overkill.
I’d then do my own drawings when the guy pulled the cable.
I don’t see how a picture helps you locate without dimensions.
At one time I was responsible for the upkeep of a church. It had a bunch, 5-10, branch of breaker boxes. I spent a bunch of time getting the breakers properly labeled. Then, behind my back, the minister hired a shoddy contractor to install some more circuits. The bastard didn’t label them.
Who is the “wiring guy” for this type of wiring? Is it typically the electrician?
I will be building a new house soon and am not sure my general contractor is up to date on all the latest technology. And I’m not real sure who does the cat5/6 or smart home wiring these days. I need to make sure I have a meeting of the minds with the right wiring guy!
an electrician can do all the low voltage and signal wiring.
In some places wiring, even low voltage signal, must be done by an electrician.
For our wiring, the electrician marked on the studs where the outlets would go. We had the cat5e, cable tv, alarm, audio installed by a home electronics company that specialized in new home wiring and fancy home theatres.
I have seen a lot of industrial sites and offices recently have been labeling all their outlets by breaker and panel. Not sure if this is a new safety code but it makes sense.
Most television to box interconnect now is HDMI, and more and more ‘cable’ companies are switching to digital delivery, even if they have a coax coming into the house. Satellite dishes do still generally use coax, but I see more and more entertainment services going to CAT6.
If I were building a home right now, I probably still would go ahead and run at least one hardwired telephone line to each room, one RG6 coax, and two CAT6 UTP cables (one for pure data, one for media). Bring everything together at one point, and use one of the Structured Media panel offerings to make the installation clean and organized.
Also, consider where you will be placing your televisions… It is convenient and common now to mount flat screens on the wall, if you know you are going to do that, or plan to, make sure you put signal and power connections high up on the wall where the device will be mounted.
WiFi is great, but it is always nice to have hardwired data connections. Make everything data-side in the house gigabit, which is good if you start streaming media from a home server.
While you are at it, in your primary entertainment room, consider equipment placement, and run some speaker wires in the walls. Trust me, it is MUCH cheaper to run wiring during construction then after the fact.