Greetings from the great white north

[Shandley]

Hello automation world!

I am an electrician who has much expereience with structured cabling. Currently I am wiring a new home with Radio Ra2 and HAI FI2 for music. I am thinking about suggesting the OmniproII as a controller.

I am hoping to get some inside info... literally . I would need to know what cables to run inside the walls to where. I stumbled on the wiki and I have most of what is there. I am thinking that I should run 4 or 5 CAT6 cables to every room regardless of the room. It seems anything can run over CAT6 cable.

Anyways, look for my posts. I will be needing some answers pretty quick.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Are you looking into installing a security system as well? We do have a wiring guide here also.

I'm a big believer of not using Cat x cable for security purposes, rather 22-2 for non-powered sensors and 22-4 for powered. Strobes and sirens may need the increase of 18g.

Also consider conduit for future runs.

 

[tmbrown97]

Greetings!

Everything comes down to personal preference; during preconstruction it's nice because you can do anything you want...but technology will change later.

My basic advice is to run things to two near-opposing walls in each room - like my last house (major overkill) had 3x Cat5 and 3x Coax in a plate, and I had these plates on opposing walls of every room. I barely used a fraction of them. This current house was already built and very difficult to add to, so I'm getting by just fine with a single Cat5 per room. The market caters to the largest market segment - and that's people with zero to minimal existing cabling... so where DirecTV used to need 4 Coax + an ethernet, it's now all a single wire; TV's are coming with wireless built in now!

The good news is that more and more will run over IP now, not just Cat5 - so I have TV and Internet everywhere I need it; the worst I had to do was buy VLAN-Capable switches so I could separate my networks out better over that single port.

Anyways - if you know of things like Video, either run it now or - better yet - put in conduit or smurf tube. One decent HDMI over CatX converter will cost about $500 for one that actually works... but if the conduit is there you can buy a rapidrun cable for $75 and be done... That said, you're right - just about anything else can be done with Cat5 (there's nothing that even requries Cat6 in the residential market yet). Run what you can think of, without locking yourself into a particular furniture configuration (kids rearrange rooms all the time!); and make sure you leave yourself some room to make changes; access paths, conduit, etc - are all handy.


And I'm completely with BSR regarding security cabling - use the right stuff; and that's where you might forget things. If you already have the HiFi2 you'll probably stick with HAI for security - I don't know their requirements, but some of the less common runs I had were - doorbell sensor; garage door sensors and triggers; gate sensors; wire for speakers inside the house; wire for strobes; things like that... For smoke detectors, if you do that, you need to use fire-rated wire (and per UL there's more restrictions, like at least one keypad connected via fire-wire, and some other).