Need some suggestions on cleaning up that panel

shenandoah75

Active Member
For those who haven't seen what i ave ahead of me:

My closet

1) if you were tying a lot of stuff onto a single feed (aux / saux powering a bunch of devices with a lot of wires (4 or more)), what would you use? punch blocks/wirenuts?

2) if you could reuse your existing enclosures elsewhere and could close up the studs and move to a plywood base, would you mount the ethernet/coax distribution and devices on plywood instead of in a panel? (in my pics, i could move the large panel to the office, and the 28"er to where the Elk M1 14" can is - consolidating all the local elk expanders there.

3) for whole house audio, would you board mount the IR distribution or put it in a can?

4) if you moved to board mount, how would you get into the ceiling cleanly without big holes? conduit or is there something better?

5) if some of your closet was board and some panel, how do you best deal with coming out of the panel clealy to deviced on the board (thinking from the elk box - serial/ethernet/rs-485/etc). Namely thinking the ELK-M1XRF2G or the serial output to a UPB plugin device, etc... would also apply to speakers. maybe a plank plate and drill a hole the required diameter?

any other tips would be appreciated ( i keep looking for more examples of installs)!
-brad
 
1.) I used terminal strips as an AUX power bus and Audio bus for my M1. It is especially handy for the audio bus because you can rewire series/parallel as you add speakers just by adjusting jumpers. I mounted these directly under the M1.

As for the rest, I don't know what to tell you. I have everything in cans and an AV rack. I prefer to mount the M1 cards flat vs. the way you mounted yours but this does take up space. You can look at my layout via the link in my sig. Since I took those pictures I have added another 14" can to hold an AUX power supply and the M1 batteries and added some more cards to my main M1 enclosure (42").

It looks like you have the wall space, if it were me I would lose the two 14" elk cans and use 42" Leviton or 50" Channel Master. 3 cans would probably give you enough space for everything. I don't know if you have enough cable to reterminate though...
 
Actually - that's a 42" leviton panel on the left of the Elk 14" in main closet... (that the one i really want to clean up asap)...

I am thinking of dropping that panel for surfacing mounting for a few main reasons (plus the clutter):
1) Heat. All those powered components (and the wall wart transformers) generate a bit. If i close this up, worried about this.
2) Continued growth. I've already outgrown the 8 ports i have on the switch. at a minimum, i would need another one of those and another the leviton 6-jack mini-patch strip just to wire what i have...
3) power supplies - i only have 4 outlets in the 42" panel from the JBoxes... To get more i have to add a power strip which takes up even more space in the can.


On the cable, ya i didn't do myself any favors - both cat6 and rg6 would need to stay to far left no matter what i do...
-brad
 
Personally I started with a board mount, but I am in the process of removing it and putting everything into cans and an equipment rack. However, I wasn't too far along (no M1 or anything like that yet). I am putting in 2 -50" cans and I have a 24U equipment rack that I picked up on e-bay for cheap. I decided to put the coaxial distribution in the can and the telephone/ethernet distribution in the equipment rack. I'm terminating the data lines using patch panels and I have a 24 port gigabit switch all mounted in the rack, so it made the most sense to do the telephone distribution there too rather than have a bunch of long patch cords running from the rack to a can mounted telephone distribution center.

In the end it really doesn't matter if things are board mounted or can mounted. I just think that I can mounted system will be able to be closed up tight and look nicer in the end. Of course board mounted is probably easier and is certainly cheaper.
 
Actually - that's a 42" leviton panel on the left of the Elk 14" in main closet... (that the one i really want to clean up asap)...

I am thinking of dropping that panel for surfacing mounting for a few main reasons (plus the clutter):
1) Heat. All those powered components (and the wall wart transformers) generate a bit. If i close this up, worried about this.
2) Continued growth. I've already outgrown the 8 ports i have on the switch. at a minimum, i would need another one of those and another the leviton 6-jack mini-patch strip just to wire what i have...
3) power supplies - i only have 4 outlets in the 42" panel from the JBoxes... To get more i have to add a power strip which takes up even more space in the can.


On the cable, ya i didn't do myself any favors - both cat6 and rg6 would need to stay to far left no matter what i do...
-brad

Another thing I did recently was to consolidate all of my wall warts into an elk power supply. That should free up some space/heat issues and give you battery backup to boot. I moved my dsl modem and linksys router to the power supply as well as my M1XEP. A 14" can is just big enough to hold two batteries the power supply and my Elk transformer. If heat is a concern, another thought is the panel extenders for the leviton cans. I installed one on mine, they have vents all around and should help dissipate the heat, you could add a small fan also and connect it to the 12v supply.
 
FYI - thinking along the lines of consolidating what's in the 42" can into Mike's panels #1/#2 in the following:

http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=2333

That looks pretty good. I would have added some kind of cable management to keep things under control, even if it was just screwed down velcro loops.

BTW, I update the website in my sig today with closeups of my elk install with the extra power supply and terminal strips...
 
Thx for the posts.... love your setup!!!! i wish i ad that much room for HT...

Funny i had just started looking at those slimline racks, but man they are pricey!!!! I think i'm gonna build an in-wall storage unit fro MDF and 2xs for my equipment in that closet...


found this which looks interesting too: http://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/showflat....7219&page=0
-brad

Thanks for the kudos.

I only have the one slimline rack, and it is the cheapest option I could find in a 4 post rack. It is also nice that it ships disassembled, so it doesn't come as freight. One of its drawbacks though is lack of depth. My DVD changer and PC hang out the back. I don't think I have the carpentry skills to do something custom or with rails alone, but you're right that shelf setup looks pretty sweet.
 
Well i just spent quite a bit on some 4U swing out 19" racks and tons of jacks/pass throughs... Definately moving networking/audio to seperate panels similar to Mike's install. That should go a long, long way! Will let me move the 14" can to where i need it and put the elk in the 42" enclosure with elk modules only. a heck of a lot less clutter.

I will have some IR immiter wires/speaker cables and eventually either component and/or hdmi draped somewhere along the ceiling from those panels to the equipment...

thx for all the tips (as well as the ribbing)
-brad
 
Damn this thread.

Damn Brandon.

I think i'm going to take week of 7/4 off, rip out the last 10' of wiring for all my stuff (so horrific shenandoah would smile), then rerun it. it's been very organic, i initially thought i'd have perhaps 10-25 runs, then 40, then 70, now it looks like more.

I chose my wiring runs poorly, I have 5 holes in the wall where wire comes through because I kept filling them up.

Damn it damn it. I finally get CQC and the Elk nearly "done", and now i'm sure i'm going to screw it all up.
 
FYI - thinking along the lines of consolidating what's in the 42" can into Mike's panels #1/#2 in the following:

http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=2333

Good luck, I just saw this (and nice progress on your project). The panel approach has been flexible for me. Kind of like IVB noted, you'll know exactly what you want after you have done everything. The drawback with the way mine was mounted is that to work on those connections you have to unpatch things to get to it. Frankly I very rarely need to do anything with those, and group additions together to make it easier.

Wuench was absolutely correct with the comment on wire management. I've seen a bunch of approaches here since that was started. I've been stuck on slowly redoing the first runs that were done that wind up outside the wall in the garage (unfortunately it was as I was moving in and I had someone help me get the wiring done and I was not focused on what was being done. I've since ripped down all the sheetrock and have been rerunning or rerouting the wiring to fix that. The final stages will probably wind up moving the panels around perhaps since I don't have a lot of extra wire. I hope to complete it before I sell the house (it has been an 'in progress for quite some time)).

Note that since you have a real wall there, you can do similar things inside a can if you like. My wall was concrete so it further lent itself to panels. For the elk, I need to replace that can with a larger one, I was trying to not remount it but after trying it I wish that I had.

I'll have to update my thread as well, I'm actually putting in the component video distribution in now (I had it hooked up originally but not with the distribution amplifiers or a component switcher as I only had one component source in the basement. Now I have two Sony Jukeboxes and a component Tivo.)
 
Back
Top