Best way to wire a new house.

[wuench]

I suggest conventional wiring of your lighting, with a neutral in every box. You're looking for trouble home-running without a lighting control system in place.

I agree, it's fun to think about doing something non-standard, but unless you are going to pick a system now and go with it, you are better off just following today's standards. A few things come to mind to watch out for that are legal code-wise but not a good idea for automated lighting. 1.) NO SHARED NEUTRALS. 2.) Neutral to every box (meaning power runs to switch then to light, no tailing switches off of the light). This is a big one, make sure the electrician understands this and follows it. You're gonna have to watch them close. 3.) Whole house surge protector. 4.) Good single ground for all electrical, phone, data, TV,etc. Do not ground to separate locations, if possible make sure the ground has plenty of earth around it, not concrete, or use multiple grounds tied together. A ground is like a bucket it will fill up if a surge hits close, if you have multiple buckets electricity will fill one up and take the path of least resistance to the next one. If not tied together directly, this will be through your house and through your equipment. The ideal ground system would be to completely surround your house with ground rods and tie them together, but outside of some commercial installations I doubt this has ever been done.

You might also think about panel locations, etc. Think about things you may want to do in the future and how you would get electric there off of the panel. I really like having a panel in the furnace/utility room for example so if you ever need to change-out/upgrade HVAC you can tap into it. Some houses have two panels, one on each side of the house. This is very nice for future expansion. At the very least maybe consider conduit from your panel to things like the garage, furnace room, attic, near your data distribution panel, etc to facilitate future runs.

 

[apostolakisl]

4.) Good single ground for all electrical, phone, data, TV,etc. Do not ground to separate locations, if possible make sure the ground has plenty of earth around it, not concrete, or use multiple grounds tied together.

Very Important! Two grounds is worse than no grounds. It will encourage flow through your house if charge on one side is different than the other. You want to try to make your house like one solid block of metal touching the Earth as a single unit. It isn't volts that damages stuff, it is current. It is like the guy in a helicopter fixing 50,000 volt lines. He is charged with 50,000 volts, but since electrons have no where to flow, there is no injury. I like to think of it like a pipe full of water. You can change the pressure up or down, but if there are no leaks, nothing happens. Just avoid electrical leaks.

 

[Sandpiper]

The best way to future-proof your house wiring is to make sure you can get easy future access to the electrical panel. One way to assure this is to install an empty conduit from the panel to the attic-space or crawl-space. Make sure the panel is located in a spot where this can be achieved. Also, make sure the panel has some excess capacity. An alternative is to locate a subpanel with spare capacity in a location where such access is possible.

Another thing is to review the house plans to make sure you can get access to most locations in the house, either from above (attic) or from below (basement or crawlspace). I've seen many houses built recently where vaulted ceilings and open spaces block any attempt for future changes.

 

[apostolakisl]

If you can do this, I would suggest using floor trusses instead of dimensional wood or the composite "i beams" This makes pulling wires and running conduit much easier. And as Sandpiper said, I am a huge fan of conduit. Run lots of it. A trick I did in my house is to use a propane torch and heat up the grey electrical conduit slightly and then you can almost make it flex conduit. I prefer the grey stuff because 1) it is way cheap, and 2) it is smooth walled making it easier to fish wires.

 

[Del91574]

Single ground rod/point and all the systems ground to that point as said. Best would be to do like a commercial building with a bus bar and lugs for all the home systems to tie to.

Wire the house traditional, barring a neutral in every box and if you're really up to spending some cash, then bring the loads for a HA lighting control back to a central distribution point, ala Vantage or Leviton stuff. Pulling wiring to a keypad location is OK, but you need to know what system you're planning for so you know if it's a 2 cond. standard, Category cable or multiconductor with shield.

Unless you're planning for one of those systems out of the box, I'd steer away from a non-traditional rough outside of planning for enough capacity on the breakers/panels/subs, as well as the AFCI's, which last I knew were required in every bedroom. Tamper-proof outlets depend on your juristiction at the moment. As a rule of thumb for a standard house, I say a breaker/circuit per room, barring the appliances and special circumstances.

 

[Zoo]

Thank you all for your answers!

Lutron GrafikEye units could be a solution to your wall clutter problem, if you don't mind the look of the units. Each GE can replace a bank of switches.

How many switches can it replace? And is the wiring 100% standard with GE, or I still need to change/add a few things?