Hi,

When we built my house I asked the electrical guys to put in Wall plates for CAT6 (dual, one for ethernet, one for phone) at each point. Then bring all the home runs into the basement with plenty of slack. You can do the CAT6 stuff yourself, but the most difficult bit is you need to do it in a timely manner. I.e. you need to get all that wiring done while the sheet rock walls are open. Remember on a build, time is money. If you throw off your GC's schedule there is a knock on effect. A 4 month delay is going to hit you on interest and cost overun charges.

I would get the contractor people to:
1) Put in the home run CAT6, x2 per point
2) Put in Coax for TV, x2 per point
3) Put in Coax to the roof (for possible Satalite dish)
4) Put in Coax to the roof (for possible Antenna)

You can then mess about with the home runs and your rack of equipment in your basement after you move in.

The home theater bit is more tricky. You need to put in lots of cables for that TV. Also these cables have finite length. 30 feet is like very long for an HDMI cable. While you have your walls open put in:

1) HDMI cables x2, from TV to cabinet
2) RGB cables x2, from TV to cabinet
3) L-R Audio pairs x4, from Tv to cabinet
4) Coax where the TV will sit to basement
5) Coax where the Video recorder will sit to basement
6) Video, x1 from TV to cabinet
7) S-Video, x1 from TV to cabinet
8) Power points with Surge supressor socket in wall at TV
9) 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick piece of plywood where you want your TV
to be. A big piece, and secure this to your wall studs and place behing the sheet rock.
Those TV's are heavy, especially if you want a swing out articulated mount.

That is alot of cables. Avoid Monster cables which are a rip off. I got all my cables from Pacific Cable. Prices and service I found to be good and the cables work fine. I recomend alot of cables because once you put up that sheet rock, you are done, no chance to change.

For complete home theater you also need sound. I did not have speaker wires put in. So am not that much of an expert in that area. I would say that ticker is better and fortunately fairly long runs are OK. You need to figure out where your speakers should be though and plan accordingly.

Other low voltage wiring includes, Alarm, Smoke, Carbon monoixide detectors. recommend you get ADT / Brinks or someone like that to ensure it is up to code, and will
interface OK to their monitoring station.

Finally there is the door bell... which I would leave to your carpenter. So that you have a nice looking finished look. Wiring is easy. Mounting nicely etc. more difficult.

Hope this is useful.
Best, Mike.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.pacificcable.com/

Thanks for the quick response, tiger! Yes, I know about the dangers of upsetting GC's schedule. However, the plumbing will not be done for at least another 3 weeks, and the various rough inspections will take 2-3 weeks more :-(

So I have some time to prepare and do it... Regarding your list (thanks, very illuminating, BTW). Do I need to run coax to the TV directly? Shouldn't I rather run coax to the closet, where the cable box will sit? The cable box will then talk to the receiver, which will send video to the TV (monitor) and sound to the speakers?

Regarding surge-suppressors  if I get one for the entire house (such as PowerwoRx)  do I still need to worry about surge-protecting individual sockets anyway?

Smoke detectors are handled by the electrician  because of the code requirements. But he is expensive, and I don't want to pay him to run low-voltage cables :-)

Do you have experience with video matrix switches? It would seem, I could use one of these to plug in all of my security cameras (8 of them) and the 2-3 cable boxes on one side, and all of the TVs on the other. This will then let me watch any of the cameras and any of the cable-boxes on any TV...

Lastly, any experience with Control4 equipment? It seems to control other units via serial cables, but the details aren't widely available (they invite "professionals" to take their training)... Is it really that difficult?

Thanks again. Yours,
doofus

Hi,

I recommend running coax to both TV and the cable box two wires. Most new TV's have QAM tuners in them which will hook up without the cable box. Note however to get the full, video on demand, and some encrypted channels etc. you will need the cable box. I found that sometimes it is just easier to turn on the TV without brining online all the other boxes.

Surge suppression is kind of an insurance. Some people go to quite some extremes in protecting their eqipment, others less so. I think it depends on what equipment you have. I have the "standard" lower cost stuff. What I have is a surge arrester / supressor at the main power feed into the house, whole house supressor. A supressor on the cable TV hook up into the house.
I then also have surge supression on each TV and Hi Fi. Note the individual surge supressors are quiet cheap and you can buy these power strip things at Home Depot. The more difficult one to get is the surge supressor power socket which you need for wall mounted TV's. I got mine online, I think E-bay. Some people have these power conditioning boxes for their HI-Fi setups. Not so familiar with those.

As far as Video Matrix switches I am not so familiar. I have no security cameras. Also no experience with Control 4.

What I do find interesting that you may be interested in is Z-wave products. Z-wave is a way to control lights in your house. So you can have the lights dim for your home theater. Z-Wave is a standard and about 100 manufacturers follow the standard. The switches, sockets, controls are quite expensive *BUT* you can put them in yourself. All you need to do is to ask your electrician to make sure that at each light switch point there is a Live, Neutral and Earth. Most lighting circuits may not have a neutal brought in. You can then add them later after you move in as and when you like. I wish I had done this....

Warmest regards, Mike.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.z-wave.com/modules/Z-Wave-Start/

The only reason not to do it yourself is if the low voltage is part of an electrical inspection requiring a permit. Your electrical contractor willnot want you doing any work that involves his permit.
Otherwise there is no reason for not doing it yourself.

You may be able to get a permit for your own home. Remember that the rules are similar for electrical wiring. You should put a little fibreglass insulation between any warm air hvac duct and hot water pipe, and any wires that may contact them. You will want to allow wires for telephones too, I know most people use cordless but you want to be able to choose where to put the base station, and you want at least one hardwired phone if the power goes out. My house was built in the 80's and as far as I can see has only two phone jacks, I am rectifying that. There is no excuse for a new house to not have at least one phone jack and one network jack (you can use the same wire, Cat5e or Cat6) for both.

I know some people will argue in favour of wireless internet but wired is faster and more reliable.

We had a discussion about prewiring a house (you should also consider prewiring for alarms, you need "Station Z" which is 4-wire, although you can also use Cat5e)

Typically you would allow for a keypad near the garage entry (inside) door if that's your principal entry, plus one in the master bedroom if you want (or future owner) wants to have system on at night, wires for door and window contacts on all the accessible doors/windows, a siren either above your doorbell or in your cold air return if permitted, an outside siren/strobe, motion sensors on the lower floors, in areas that will not be blocked by kitchen cabinets etc, ideally facing entries and/or stairs, plus one or more 'spare' wires in the attic, all home-running to a convenient spot near the media panel, with provision for phone connection and power.

You can also run wires to locations near the hardwired smoke detectors, you can either tie them via relay to the alarm panel, or install separate smoke alarms that connect only to the panel, you could put them next to the mains wired ones. This way you can have a monitored system so the monitoring service can call you/fire department if alarm is tripped. You may also want wires for water detectors in key areas like behind fridge/dishwasher, near hw tank and washing machine.

A wire for a low temp alarm is a good idea, although you can just mount the sensor right next to the alarm panel if it's not close to an alternate source of heat. The idea behind the low temp alarm is, if you are travelling and the furnace fails, it will contact you/a monitoring station to alert you of issues before damage from freezing is done.

Here is a link that might be useful: Prewiring a house

The GC is telling us, we do not need a permit for low-voltage cabling. He is himself an electrician and is doing the electrical wiring himself (with subordinates).

But for low-voltage, according to him, neither a license nor a permit are required.

This is in NJ, Union county...

As a fellow DIY'er, I'd like to point out that there is some stuff that can go wrong. Catastrophic failure is unlikely, but there is a lot of gray area in the performance category. I'm in the middle of a major remodel and figured I'd run some cable lines while the walls are open.

Well...... it went in super easy. The cable is easy to snake from floor to floor with the walls open. In theory, I did everything right. The problem is that I didn't have a good way to test the quality of the connections since we didn't have cable turned on yet. Once we actually "went live" I found that the living room and 1 bedroom are fine. A second bedroom had some quality problems with the non-digital channels and I'm going to have to run another line.

If you are going to do it yourself, be sure that any junctions, splits etc are accessible once the finished walls are up. Also, determine a way to test your work BEFORE the walls are up.

Thanks, billl, that's a good point. Any suggestions for the testing equipment? I'll need to test the coax cables and CAT6. If these are expensive, I think, I'd rather rent one  if anybody knows, who has these for rent...

Yours,
doofus