Structured wiring (1 Viewer)

[Volvelle]

Hi,
I'm new here, so sorry if this has been addressed somewhere else already.

I've been looking at building a new home, and in particular been interested in ensuring that I have the right wiring behind the plaster to allow me to do what I need to when I want to with respect to AV solutions.

I'm not putting the home theatre or a majority of the AV technologies immediately but I want to make sure that as much pre-work is done at the point of building so that I don't have more expensive retrofit costs.

I have heard about having the house Smart Wired. What does this exactly mean? and does it actually provide me with what I might need?

Thanks for you thoughts everyone.

 

[Robert_J]

Plan ahead. It's easier to draw it out on paper and determine what cables are needed to connect everything. Add a few extra. If you have an equipment closet that is even better. It becomes the source of all wiring to each room. It's easy to run the individual wires instead of the expensive, bundled 'structured wiring' if you do it yourself. If you are paying someone to run wire by the pull, then running a dozen wires in one run ends up being cheaper.

-Robert

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

This question is really better suited to the "Members Home Theater Projects" section, which is dedicated to constructing home theater rooms and related topics. The "Basics" section is really geared more towards people just getting their first HDTV or first surround sound system. You might want to ask one of the moderators to move it for you.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Shango]

Being "Smart Wired" is just having the necessary cabling for your current requirements and being able to accommodate a future upgrade generation or two. The typical setup right now is two coax and two ethernet to each room of your house, Cat 5E or better on the ethernet cables. This allows two video sources and wired internet and/or phone service to each room. Sometimes people put in optical in addition to the other 4 lines, but the hardware to utilize the optical is still more money than most people have to spend. Although it may be of some use in the future, I don't see a need for it for the next two decades at least since Cat 5E network cable is perfectly capable of carrying gigabit ethernet, and if you want to go all out you can put in Cat 6 and maybe get 10Gb network speeds in the future for a minimal cost, especially if you want to transfer hdmi over ethernet. I've read that optical can't handle full resolution soundtracks, so it may be a complete waste of money if true, unless you can find multiplexing equipment cheap.

I would recommend doing the standard dual rg6 coax and dual ethernet, prefereable cat6 if you can afford it, and ensure that everything is run in conduit with extra pulls so that if you do need to run new cable in the future, it will be easily accomplished.