kgingerich's new home

Disclaimer - I've never done some of this stuff before so if you see me doing something wrong please tell me. I'm an IT guy by trade so pulling wires has been the only part I'm really comfortable with in this project. The rest of the knowledge comes from you fine folks and other forums.

The equipment:
Lighting control via UPB Gen II
Video dist. via Audio Authority Avatrix
Whole house audio via 3 Russound CAV6.6's
Intercom via Russound Compoint using 19 ISK2 keypads
Rain8Net for irrigation control
Proliphix IP Thermostats controlling 4 zones
Security via ELK M1G
8 PTZ vid cameras (make/model to be determined)
Sentrol glass breaks
Bosch blue light motion sensors
G.R.I. 2800 water sensors under all sinks/tubs/washing machine/hot water heater
ELK-WSV main water shutoff
And mainlobby to control it all.

Wiring used:
Genesis Model #11031309 22/4 for security contacts
Genesis Model #50922206 Cat6 for data
Belden Model #1700A DataTwist Cat5e for all non Data connections (video distro.)
Belden Model #1694A RG6 QS Coax for everything.

Image of the new home from this summer.
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Side Yard with the kiddos tooling around on the 4wheeler
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Back Yard
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Image of some of the wires coming from the attic on the second floor through the top plate of the first floor heading to the termination location in the basement. I bought some wood screw in style wire rings that I was really happy with. I just screwed them on every few studs and it made for a clean look and easy to pull lots of wire through.
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Here is a poor quality image taken with my cell phone (sorry) of all the wires just hanging out in the basement.
324 total wires that need to be terminated.
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Another cell phone image of the wires dropping out of the ceiling. Note the two 2 inch PVC conduits capped off that run into the attic for future runs.
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Image of the first of 4 Channelvision 50" cans being installed for termination of security system contacts and telephone wires. I got the idea from Dan and DJK to use 66 blocks, barrier strips, and wire ducts all mounted on a 1/2" sheet of plywood painted white. I finished punching it down last night but forgot to get a picture of it. I'll update it later. Thank you both for your idea... it's worked out awesome.
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EDIT- Updated images
Updated image of ELK Security system. ELK Power supplies on far left, middle 50" enclosure for all ELK equipment and right 50" enclosure for terminations of all security system wires.
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Updated image of the coax termination enclosure. Bottom coax with power strips are for my video security camera feeds.
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Updated image of enclosure for all CAT5E and CAT6 wires. Cat6 for data and the 5e was for all the video routing (i.e. avatrix system) as well as various other things (thermostats, IR routing, etc...)
The white wires you see dangling are speaker wires for the whole house audio system. I"m going to terminate them directly into the equipment on the rack when i get the ladder racking and server racks in place.
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All the enclosures with the doors shut. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Yipee!!
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That's it for right now... I'll be finishing the other cans in a few weeks and will begin the intercom and whole house audio installs soon.

Some notes that may or may not help anyone:
1) cable in a box generally sucks. Obviously this depends on the manufacturer but most of them come out and want to kink and you have to spend a lot of time fixing kinks inside the box that keep the wire from coming out. Cable on a roll tends to work much better. Cable on a roll inside a box is an awesome idea as long as the delivery man doesn't drop kick it on the way to your house causing the plastic parts inside to break. Always check those boxes upon delivery and return if they're broken.
2) the wood rings work awesome in new construction. something like these.
3) Spend a lot of time figuring out each run before hand because running one extra wire because you forgot it is a huge waste of time.
4) Label the wires however you want but I'd recommend putting an identifier in front of your numbering scheme on the wires. What I mean is "WS 1,2,3,etc.." for water sensor and "SC 1,2,3,etc.." for security contacts. This way you can easily group wires together at the termination point without having to lookup each number identifier. It'll make termination a little easier I think.
5) Obviously take a lot of photos and videos before drywall!
6) Electricians generally don't understand low voltage interference concerns so if you care about it at all then do your LV wire pulling AFTER the electricians so you can work around their stuff. I did mine during electrical so I kept having to go back and move my wires after I'd notice a 3" HV sub panel line running next to a huge group of CAT6 cables. That's not good!
7) If you have several coax cables going to one location like a plasma above the fireplace; i found it easier to purchase several different colors of coax so it's easy to identify which cable goes where.

That's it for now, i'll update as much as possible during my journey.
 
1) cable in a box generally sucks. Obviously this depends on the manufacturer but most of them come out and want to kink and you have to spend a lot of time fixing kinks inside the box that keep the wire from coming out. Cable on a roll tends to work much better.

Preach that! The worst and repeated problems I had was with the Cat5 and 6....which weren't offered in anything but a box. Hated 'em, though!
 
Very nice house. You obviously spent a great deal of time in planning.

One question, With 3 Russound Cav6.6s and Compoint, did you look at the VM1 for video? I didn't see anything about how many video zones you will have or SD vs. HD, but the VM1 can do up to 8 and with Rnet, it syncs automatically to the Cav.
Just curious.
 
Nice house! I'm curious why you went with UPB instead of hardwired for lighting.

I actually was planning on putting in ONQ cat5 based lighting control but changed my mind at the last minute. I bought an ONQ relay and got a lot of push back from the electrician and inspectors about having LV in a HV box. They said we could make it work but I simply didn't feel like dealing with it. That and the fact that I was in the middle of pulling 300 LV wires throughout the house made me change my mind and risk losing some reliability. I keep hearing good things about the UPB GEN II devices in terms of reliability so if they are up to the hype I think I'll be happy. I'm sure the ONQ products are top notch but it wasn't a good fit for me.
 
Very nice house. You obviously spent a great deal of time in planning.

One question, With 3 Russound Cav6.6s and Compoint, did you look at the VM1 for video? I didn't see anything about how many video zones you will have or SD vs. HD, but the VM1 can do up to 8 and with Rnet, it syncs automatically to the Cav.
Just curious.

Yes I looked at the VM1 but didn't like that it doesn't have local audio support at the wallplate. I don't always want to have to listen to TV sound through my whole house audio speakers.

I just think the audio authority product will give me more flexibility. The VM1 product looks pretty nice though and I see their reasoning for not providing local wallplate audio support since it's designed to integrate with the CAV family.
 
Hey does anyone know of a patch panel for speaker leads that would work well in my channelvision cans? I have (24) 14/4 speaker leads waiting to be terminated but I'm not sure what product to use for it.

Kyle
 
nice stuff. I'm jealous - all those wires nice and neatly run... I had to retrofit wire my house so it's very difficult to make it look that clean! Looks great and looking forward to seeing more.
 
Hi Kyle,

Great looking house and nice photos of your pre-wire.

I'm nat aware of any speaker termination units made for structured wiring enclosures. Channel Vision, Leviton, ON-Q and others make speaker distribution modules, but they're for connecting multiple pairs of speakers to a single amp.

When I need to terminate speaker wiring in a structured wiring enclosure, I use sectional terminal blocks. These are modular terminal strips that can be stacked onto an aluminum channel which is cut to length to suit the application.

Below are some photos as an example. For 24 pairs of speakers, you'd need 48 terminal blocks and enough aluminum channel to mount them. They come in many different sizes, but what I show below works well for speaker wire up to 12ga.

24 terminal blocks side-by-side is about 11" long and would fit in the Channel Vision enclosures you have... you'd need to do two rows to accomodate all your speakers.

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Cheers,
Paul
 
Paul,

Where do you buy those? I'm using some of the barrier strips from rat shack to terminate LV power but i haven't seen those particular strips before.

Do you think lowes or home depot might have something like that?

Thanks,
Kyle
 
Yes I looked at the VM1 but didn't like that it doesn't have local audio support at the wallplate. I don't always want to have to listen to TV sound through my whole house audio speakers.

I just think the audio authority product will give me more flexibility. The VM1 product looks pretty nice though and I see their reasoning for not providing local wallplate audio support since it's designed to integrate with the CAV family.
I understand. I had 2 locations that were TV only and I did a 2 gang wall plate with the VM1 connections in one and the speaker connections in the 2nd. Then I connected everything directly to the TV. Works okay, but limits using the zone for audio only.
 
Very nice Kyle, but you know this, LOL.

Why did you decide to go with the 6.6 CAV as opposed to the CAM? If you dont need video, the CAM gives you the tuner. Just curious.
 
Very nice Kyle, but you know this, LOL.

Why did you decide to go with the 6.6 CAV as opposed to the CAM? If you dont need video, the CAM gives you the tuner. Just curious.

Thanks!

The CAV offers ABUS zones and video distro (stuff I don't need) but also some stuff I do need. Paul from SBSmarthomes had this to say "The CAV6.6 provides source loop connections making it easy to daisy chain multiple controllers. If you choose two CAM controllers, you'll need to use "Y" cables to patch your source gear between the CAMs. Something else that's beneficial with the CAV6.6 is the audio paging input which allows you to take audio from an external device and have it interrupt the audio playing in the zones. I use this often in installs with automation controllers from HAI & Elk that have speech capabilities allowing them to "speak" announcements throughout the house. Most automation software also has speech capability using text-to-speech (TTS). "

The price difference was minimal so I went with the CAV's.

Kyle
 
Paul,

Where do you buy those? I'm using some of the barrier strips from rat shack to terminate LV power but i haven't seen those particular strips before.

Do you think lowes or home depot might have something like that?

Thanks,
Kyle

Kyle,

I don't think you'll have any luck finding these at any home centers or hardware stores. I buy them from a local wholesale electric supply that caters to industrial electric/automation so they carry lots of stuff like this. I have to buy them in boxes of 100 and the track comes in different lengths and can be easily cut to size.

On-line sites like mouser or digikey will probably have them (or similar) and you might be able to purchase singularly? Be aware there are hundreds of variations fo these terminal blocks so it's easy to get overwhelmed looking through the parts catalogs. The ones I pictured work great for speakers, and I've got a smaller version I use for alarm and other low-volt wiring.

Cheers,
Paul
 
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