"Wiring My Home", by Thomas Bradford
(subtitled, "How to Drive Your Wife Insane")
My wiring project started out with simply wanting to add a phone jack to my teenage son's bedroom. That's all I wanted to do. When I looked at options it became clear that the best way to do it would be to wire home run style instead of daisy chaining. So, while I was running the wire from the telco box to what woudl become the wiring closet and rerouting the existing phone wiring to conform to the design it occurred to me that I had 2 more kids and a big playroom without phone jacks so I wound up doing home runs to every bedroom and playroom upstairs.
After I did that I thought .. I've already got phone lines and know the routes to get wires to all the rooms without demolishing the walls - may as well put a cable jack in each room. So, RG6 to every room and a video distribution hub in the closet.
At this point I realize an enclosure would be nice, so I bought a small 11" job from Part's Express"
While I was pulling the RG6 I figured might as well do cat 5 runs to every room. Now we need a cat5 distribution hub...
(Oops.. my enclosure is full - gotta get a bigger one....)
While I was doing the cat 5 run I thought about music - so I put ceiling speakers and a volume control in every room and tied it into our home entertainment system.
After I got all that done I decided to tie my cameras into the video distribution hub and then I hooked the dvd up the video hub too so now everyone in the house can watch the same dvd on channel 94 and listen to it from their tv or ceiling speakers, whichever they prefer.
Of course, what's a big house without an intercom system.. So, I bought a Greyfox cat5 based intercom and put units in all the bedrooms, kitchen, garage, shed and the door unit by the front door.
What a lot of work! I should get 50 lashes for not being foresighted enough to d o all this at one time but to tell you the truth doing all this stuff and actually getting it to work is the most fun I've had in many a year. I still ask a lot of elementary questions (especially for you guys) but the stuff I've learned about wiring and just about my house in general really gives m e a good feeling.
Could not have went very far without help from people here and other forums. You can learn a boatload just from reading message threads and using the search function.
thanks,
Thomas
p.s. I left out the part about wall plates... I first bought wall plates that just had a phone jack. Then, when I ran the cable I replaced those with wall plates that had a phone/cable jack. Then, I replaced those with wall plates that I could put all 3 (cat5, catv, rj11) jacks in. Anyone want to buy some wall plates?