Three Roberts

This week the house passed electrical inspection as well as plumbing and framing. Drywall starts next week. In the meantime I've started adding components to the cans in the mechanical room:



Here is the bottom of the first can that now has the Netgear...

So I thought a lot about how to best terminate the powered and unpowered sensors. I liked the ides of terminating all wires at one location and then patching that termination location to the eventual destination (the Elk M1). Plus I was looking for a better way to distribute power to the 4 wire sensors that need it (H2O sensors, motion detectors, etc).  I...

The cat5e lines will carry both data and telephone. A total of 92 terminations. I terminated them all with Leviton 476TM-524 Patch panels. These are designed for the Leviton cabinets and can be hung backwards temporarily while punching down the wires then "Twist and Mount" (the TM in the name) the panel. I then labelled each with the corresponding...

I thought I was going to need to drill through the side of the aluminum clad window frame to place the reed switch for window sensors. Then I did some homework on Cocoontech and learned about a much more elegant solution. Our windows were Anderson but I guess most wood frame casement windows have a way to remove the bottom trim piece in order to access the...

It took a couple of weekends but I finished all the wire runs for the house and almost finished with the "dressing" of the wires before drywall. There is still a bit of time as the plumbers have not yet finished their work. Here is the mechanical room with all the wires to their respective cans. All the line voltage wires still need to be placed...

Last weekend with the help of one of the two Roberts we were able to run all the low voltage wiring for the third floor. Here are all the wires terminating in the mechanical room.


Here they all are bundled runing horizontaly away from the line voltage...

Here are the UPB floor plans for the 1st and second floors. The third floor is pretty much all traditional switches. The owner is a designer so he has need to have many wall wash, accent lights all on separate controls. These are the plans the electrician is using to run his line voltage power. Almost all the lighting and 1/2 hot receptacles are home run...

With the architects plans I used Visio to create wiring plans for each of the three floors. Each termination point is identified by type of outlet or sensor which determines the type of wire that is needed. By using the scale drwings I was able to determine the length of each wiring run and then the cumulative amount of wire needed for each wire type. Also...

The electricians are done with the 3rd floor so time to run some wire. Here is the stockpile before we started. It totals about 2 1/2 miles. I'm using different colored Cat5e so that runs to the same outlet box can be easily identified which wire is which. Also prior to any pulling I've made a wire layout with each wire run numbered. Will label the...

I created some scale drawings in Photoshop to see how the components would lay out. I tried to separate items by function. Here are the drawings of Cans 1, 2 and 3. ...