[mythtv-users] OT: Wiring a new construction home for A/V, Ethernet, etc

[Jeff Walther]

> Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:49:49 +0100
> From: Fredrik Hallgarde <mythtv at tedde.nu>

>>> Any advice, websites, books, etc out there for wiring a home during
>>> construction?  I'll be starting to build my house in the next month or

>> Don't run cable, run conduit then pull cable.  A 1" conduit can probably
>> hold 3-4 cables comfortably.  Run it all to a central location where
>> your
>> hub/server will be with no more than 2 ells and you're golden.
>>
>> You can always pull cable later as needed.

> 3. wherever you put one cat 6, may I suggest you put 2?


I second this (#3) recommendation.  I spent two weeks of vacation back in
'98 installing cat5 and coax in my house.  There is over half a mile of
cable running through my walls and attic now.  I have 37 cat5 ports
throughout the house, garage and attic.

Fortunately for me, I had a friend who installed (had installed by
contractor) network cable when his house was built and he immediately
found that he did not have enough ports.  I learned from his mistake.

Anywhere you think you want one port, put two.  Anywhere you think you
want two ports, put four.  Anywhere you want coax, install cat6 next to
it.  You may use a satellite system which needs to connect back to the
home office.  You may change from coax delivery to LAN delivery later. 
You can put coax and LAN ports on the same wall plate using modular jacks.
 You can put up to six (or is it eight?) jacks on a wall plate, but I
would not go above four as the wires in the wall box get crowded.

Put a wall plate on at least two opposite walls in every room and put at
least two RJ45 jacks on every wall plate.  Think about how common and
accessible electrical outlets are.

Cable and hardware are cheap compared to the cost of installation.  It's
as easy to pull four cables as one.

Run two (or more) coax cables from your wiring closet to a panel on the
side of your house where the utilities come in.  This way, if you get
cable TV they can just screw onto the F-connector you've installed and you
won't have the cable-guy drilling holes in your house.  Install two ports
because if you get satellite you might need more than one incoming line
from dishes depending on how many tuners you want supported.  Or you might
go crazy and want satellite *and* cable.

If you're interested in receiving broadcast TV, run some coax from your
wiring closet to the end of your attic closest to the local broadcast
antennas, so things will be convenient if you want to install an attic
antenna later.

If you run your incoming telephone line(s) to your wiring closet, you can
also use cat6 to run your phone.  The RJ11 phone plugs fit into the center
four connectors on the RJ45 jacks.  So, as long as lines are available,
anywhere you thought you wanted LAN access, you can also have a phone
extension, which increases the justification for running at least two
cables to every location.

Some of our cat5 is used for networking and other lines are used to put a
phone extension wherever it is convenient.  All of our four-jack plates
have at least two in use and most have three or four in use.

More and more devices (besides traditional computers) want a LAN
connection.  Our house is filling up with music clients (Roku SoundBridge)
which play music from our iTunes library.  So having jacks scattered about
like electrical outlets is useful.

Be sure to allocate an environmentally controlled (air conditioned) space
for  a wiring closet and provide it with plenty (or a big power strip) of
electrical outlets for the switch, router, modem, etc.   Terminate all of
your cat6 wires in this closet at patch panels.  Bring all your coax to
this room also.  If you can, allocate space for a server and/or MythTV
back end in this room.

I am using the space above the shelf in the coat closet as my wiring
closet.  It's not the most convenient, but it works, it was available, and
the house was built in 1970...   I had to add the electrical outlets.  But
it has no space for a server box (lower part of closet holds coats...) and
finding an air conditioned home for a box full of spinning hard drives is
a headache.

For the phone, I took another patch panel and wired six of the jacks
together.  Then the incoming line patches into one of those jacks, and the
other five are available to be connected to extensions.   We have two land
lines, so a 12 port patch panel provides 5 extensions each for both phone
lines.

As far as conduit goes, it is a nice idea, but don't let it stop you from
running plenty of cable now.  It is never going to be easier to install
the cable you want than it is before they finish the house.  Also, you
still must decide everywhere you want a wall panel/box even if you do run
conduit. So if you're going to have a box there anyway, why not run cable
to it?  The cable is cheap compared to the labor of installation.

The conduit has limited capacity for cable.  So you are probably better
off to run all the cable you install now outside of the conduit.  So
install your current cables bare and run empty (except for pull strings)
conduit for future proofing.

You will probably need a punch down tool to connect your cable to the
jacks and patch panels (although I think there are newer style punchless
jacks?).  Don't let the $50 - $100 cost throw you.  You'll use the thing
like crazy while doing this job.

Build yourself a continuity tester out of a couple of RJ45 plugs and a
long length of cable with the ends opposite the plugs cut and stripped
(and an ohmmeter), so that after you make all the connections, you can
insure that the jack at the wall really does connect to the jack at the
patch panel.  Some (small, I hope) number of your connections will be bad.
 Leave a little cable slack so that you can redo the mistakes.

Alternatively, buy a commercial continuity tester, but if you already have
an ohmmeter, the above solution is very cheap.

If you're going to run much coax buy a 500 ft. spool.  It's cheap (at
least mine was, at Graybar Electric in 1998: <$100) and the extra cable
can be used to make the cables that go between the wall and devices.

There are sites on the web which show which pattern to use when connecting
the wires in the cable to the jacks.   I don't remember any of them
anymore, but they're not hard to find.   There used to be a site called
Two Macs and a Printer which was very good.   It was oriented toward
Macintoshes, but network cable is platform agnostic.

To reemphasize the "cable is cheap" mantra.  I used all of two 1000 ft.
boxes and most of a third of cat5 cable.   That's about $180 in cable--or
maybe three hours of labor if you were paying someone for installation.  
How many hours of later installation does an extra 1000 feet of cable now
save you?

If you're planning to use wireless ethernet and only cell phones with no
land lines, then the above equations change.  However having a wired house
is *nice*.   I never must mess with configuring all the wireless ports for
proper security, etc.  I don't have bandwidth issues.  Of course, I
installed my cable before wireless really came on the scene so that may
just be cognitive dissonance talking. :-)

Jeff Walther