Finally finshed wiring (for now)

ctay

Active Member
What a night. Well after roughly 3 weeks of pulling wire after work and all day Saturday I finally finished the low voltage for my new house. This is a great feeling... Maybe I can start to like my house now after learning to hate it over the last couple weeks. Here is the damage:

7000' Cate 5E
2000' RG6QS
1000' of 95% copper braided Siamese CCTV Cable
6000' of 22/4 (wired every door and window + water sensors + god knows what)
500' of 18/4
500' of Red 18/4
500' of 18/2 (used a lot of this on the central vac)
700' of pre-terminated cable from Monoprice (Component, HDMI, DVI & VGA)
300' of speaker wire


Plus we ran 4 separate runs of conduit for different areas of the house to fill with all the wire I forgot to run...

Sure was a great feeling when I punched in that last staple and could finally say I was done... Anyway, BIG THANK YOU to all the members of this forum that answered questions and helped along the way. There was hardly a question I ran across that I couldn't find some answer to in my endless searching here.

Thanks!

Chris
 
Great job! Are you not using a whole house audio system? 300' seems kind of little for speakers compared to other stuff.
 
Great job! Are you not using a whole house audio system? 300' seems kind of little for speakers compared to other stuff.

Whole house audio was one of those things that was on the drawing board but never made it into reality... The speaker wire was just for surround in the family room and master bedroom. I plan on adding audio later to at least the upstairs so that will have to run through the conduit...

I did the HV wiring for the house too so I was already pretty burned out on wire when I started the LV stuff. I figured that I saved probably 7K by running the wire myself. I better wait a couple weeks before I tell you if it was worth it... :( :)
 
ctay,
I am sure you know this already, but if you think you will be doing whole house audio....pull the wire now.
If you are burned out, hire someone before the drywall goes up. Even with conduit things are more difficult once the walls are up. It can't be more than a half day (depending on the scale of home). It will be a lot longer after the walls are up.

Just a motivation nudge.
 
ctay,
I am sure you know this already, but if you think you will be doing whole house audio....pull the wire now.
If you are burned out, hire someone before the drywall goes up. Even with conduit things are more difficult once the walls are up. It can't be more than a half day (depending on the scale of home). It will be a lot longer after the walls are up.

Just a motivation nudge.

Agreed. I recently finished construction of my house. Initially, I thought speakers in the ceiling were foolishly expensive. Now that the house has been done for 4 months, and I have been living in it, I can say that I regret not pulling wires for speakers in the kitchen, master bedroom, and master bathroom. You might want to pull wires for speakers in these key areas even if you are not going to install speakers any time soon.
 
ctay,
I am sure you know this already, but if you think you will be doing whole house audio....pull the wire now.
If you are burned out, hire someone before the drywall goes up. Even with conduit things are more difficult once the walls are up. It can't be more than a half day (depending on the scale of home). It will be a lot longer after the walls are up.

Just a motivation nudge.

Agreed. I recently finished construction of my house. Initially, I thought speakers in the ceiling were foolishly expensive. Now that the house has been done for 4 months, and I have been living in it, I can say that I regret not pulling wires for speakers in the kitchen, master bedroom, and master bathroom. You might want to pull wires for speakers in these key areas even if you are not going to install speakers any time soon.

Oh the sadness... Just when I thought I was out you PULLED me back in... I still have a couple of days before sheetrock... guess I still have some wire to pull...
 
Oh the sadness... Just when I thought I was out you PULLED me back in... I still have a couple of days before sheetrock... guess I still have some wire to pull...

Trust me , you won't regret it. I am currently pulling wire in a hot attic for a Nuvo system and it would have been MUCH easier if the wire was there. You may also want to consider putting in speaker ceiling rings in locations where you are at least pretty sure you will be putting speakers. It will make locating them much easier and won't have to deal with finding proper locations between trusses and such later.
 
Ok, so I pulled another 600 feet of speaker wire to all the rooms with a service loop at the light switch. I also ran a Cat5 to the service loop for future control. We put the sheetrock off for a day to finish the wiring and it is funny how many things I was able to find that needed "tweaking" before the sheetrock covered them.

I don't think my wife understands how much work is ahead of me terminating all this stuff. Someday I hope I will be able to enjoy it!

Chris
 
Ok, so I pulled another 600 feet of speaker wire to all the rooms with a service loop at the light switch. I also ran a Cat5 to the service loop for future control. We put the sheetrock off for a day to finish the wiring and it is funny how many things I was able to find that needed "tweaking" before the sheetrock covered them.

I don't think my wife understands how much work is ahead of me terminating all this stuff. Someday I hope I will be able to enjoy it!

Chris

Just 1 Cat5 to each switch location? You should have run 2.

;)

I'm half-kidding. No matter how much you run, you'll always want something more or something different. With all the other pressures with a new home, you can only do what you can do.
 
Amen! We are moving in this week. I have gotten all the security and most of the automation done, have almost finished installing all the audio keypads and speakers, but haven't even started terminating all the Cat5e for phone, Cat 6 for network, and RG6 for tv, plus all the components for audio. I see a lot of long nights ahead. (I have only had to go back and do 5 runs of wiring so far since the sheetrock went up)
But its been fun so far
David
 
Just 1 Cat5 to each switch location? You should have run 2.

:(

I'm half-kidding. No matter how much you run, you'll always want something more or something different. With all the other pressures with a new home, you can only do what you can do.
My heart sank when I first read this... :)

My brother helped me run some of the wire and on the last day he told me if he ever sees another wire it will be too soon. I'll have to make sure he gets dazzled by all the cool stuff I should be able to do when this is all done or I wont' be able to talk him into doing it in his house! :)

Thanks for the tip on the Audio guys! I'm sure I would have been kicking myself later. Sure was hard to get the motivation to start pulling again! I did the math and with the HV stuff too we pulled over 3 miles of wire in my house!

Chris

PS Martin, You mind if I use "Never enough wire" in my sig line? Feels very appropriate now... ;)
 
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