Smart homes!

Tech Overhaul

I want to build a house sometime next year and I was wondering what wiring I should be installing everywhere so that the house is wired for the future...

I know I should have cat5e running from a switch to every room so that my computers and Xbox are networked. I also can run cat cable for the telephone system.

What else do you think is essential? Does anybody know anything about home automation?

yop

looked in home automation and X10 and that but did not have the time to follow it through and concluded that it was overkill.
So I installed CAT6 so that at least it will future proof me for a while!
Ran extra lenghts of cojude in the wall behind the tv for extra cables also

clearz

Cat5 is last millenium's technology. I am using WiFi here. A simple wireless router will solve all your networking needs upto 108 Mb/s (Dual channel 802.11g) You can't buy an anyway decent laptop without wireless support anymore. USB/PCI cards for your desktop are dirt cheap and next generation consloes like XBox360/PS3 will have built in support for WiFi. So Fitting your entire house with network cabling is completely unnecessary for future technologys. If you really need the speed that Cat5e/6 is capable off then go for it but Id say it wont be to long before wireless networks support gigabit speeds anyway.

Id be more worried about the connection comming into your house in this country than the internal LAN.

FrankGrimes

Go mental with the CAT5/6 cable - not everything has a wireless version, and not everyone is keen on wireless networks due to security issues, performance issues if house is big and has many concrete walls etc.

Run more than you think you need. You don't have to break them all out through the wall - take photos and draw a map of where the concealed cables are so you can get them in the future.

Run cables to places you'd never think you need them - to your heating system, light swtiches, sockets, kitchen appliances, extra ones near light sockets in case you want to have volume control in all rooms, run extra cables for speakers to each room from a central location (not sure how many are needed per speaker) so you can go with a distributed sound system withoout the need for pricey wireless transmitters/receivers. I think that automation systems essentially have to have all these wires in place and then you drop in the pricey central controlling box (a few grand) and the end points (e.g. one to control your heating) and its job oxo.

Its only 70 quid for 300 metres of CAT5e cable so be sure to put in more rather than less, if you dont use it big deal, but if you do need it youll be glad its there. I wish I'd thought of all these options when doing mine, but I did run in plenty of cables for my Windows Media Center network involving Extenders and will include XBox 360s. check out the home automation forum over on http://www.avforums.com

davelerave

Wizard Archer wrote:

I want to build a house sometime next year and I was wondering what wiring I should be installing everywhere so that the house is wired for the future...

I know I should have cat5e running from a switch to every room so that my computers and Xbox are networked. I also can run cat cable for the telephone system.

What else do you think is essential? Does anybody know anything about home automation?

you should be running nearly all your phone, alarm,network ,tv satellite camera cables back seperately to a common location to increase your options.for automated lighting control you would need to wire the lights to be controlled back seperately to a panel i think and the switches to control these lights would be wired back to the same panel in data cable .if you have a plasma tv and sound system some of that like the speakers would be wired within the one room.you need a big house to be bothered with automation

patrido

pick a central point in the house where you can put a wiring cabinet for patch panels, tv distribution amps, broadband router, etc. In home automation speak this is "node zero" Run all TV, network, phone cable points run to here and they can be patched as needed.

Network
wireless is just ok for internet access or backing up your laptop to a server, but if you're building a house from scratch i'd go for lots of cat6. i don't find wireless very reliable (especially in a big house with lots of walls to go through) and you need to know you're stuff to make it secure. in theory you can get 108Mbs with wireless, while you can easily get Gigabit with wired, even over Cat5e. Plus wireless is affected by interference from your microwave, and any other device that operates in the 2.4GHz band. Wired will always be more secure, eaiser to secure, less prone to interference and congestion, and faster than wireless.

Cat 5e is very cheap and easy to get. Cat 6 is better, though there's not a lot of equipment or applications that need the extra bandwidth offered by cat 6 yet, and it's more expensive. the price you pay for future proofing.

Whichever you choose, wire lots of it back to a patch panel, buy a switch (better than a hub) and make whatever points you want live.

TV
wire lots of tv cable back to node zero too. put in good quality tv cable. None of that brown rubbish - RG6 is fine, but better to put in CT100 or CT125. Plan to distribute your tv from node zero using something like a loftbox (http://www.tvlink.co.uk/loftbox.htm). so bring in cables from aerials, cctv to node zero. and run all the cable to tv points from here too. run at least 2 cables to most destinations to allow for an uplink as well as down. the loftbox has ir receivers that can send the signal from your remote back up to the loftbox through the uplink, so you could have your sky box in node zero and just have the remote in the living room plus the sky channel would get distributed throughout the house. you could have another remote in the bedroom too.

i also put in at least one network cable to each tv point, and 3 to the main one in the living room. in the not too distant future lots of devices, music players, set top boxes will have ethernet ports to connect to a music/video server, internet, or just other devices on the network, so the demand for network points is only going to increase, especially beside your tv.

home automation fans say think of all the possible places you might need cat5e/6 and put in 3 times that amount.

Phone
Use cat5e or cat6 for phone points as well, and also use a patch panel. you can then make any network point a phone point and vice versa. it also allows you to put in a pabx. people have sucessfully integrated skype with a pabx, so you can have voip from any handset in the house.

Home Automation
X10 is yellow pack. It can do some cool stuff, but it's cheap and nasty. CBUS is much more sophisticated, and there are lots of others too.

A few links
www.simplyautomate.co.uk
www.automatedhome.co.uk/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ukha_d/
http://www.diyha.co.uk
http://www.kat5.tv

FrankGrimes

hey patrido -thats some pretty class advice right there.

I'm interested in your point on the skype connected to a pabx. I have cat5e cables run for the phone points. This was done by the electrician and is completely separate to the cat5e cables which I put in myself and ran all 25 cables from the PC room to every other room.

In the PC room there is a phone point right beside one of the network points so I could easily use a cat5e cable to patch it in to connect the phone network to the computer network. I know nothing about pabx's and not much about skype, but I'm wondering is there any way I could connect the pabx to a network connection to feed it Voip and then route this to all the phone points (which are in handier locations) and have several skype enabled handsets throughout the house? I think it boils down to this - is one interconnection between the phone and computer networks going to enable each phone point to get skype?

As you seem to be a man (or woman!) in the know on home automation: I ran in speaker cables (the white ones) from my hi-fi point in living room to the attic so they could be used for ceiling speakers in the bedrooms if needs be (I also ran them to all other rooms too). What would I need to do to get the hi-fi to play certain music say in the bedroom?

Muchos Gratias

patrido

FrankGrimes wrote:

I think it boils down to this - is one interconnection between the phone and computer networks going to enable each phone point to get skype?

I know very little of how to do this, only that it has been done. Asterisk seems to be the way to go... it's an open source software pbx. So it runs on a PC with windows or linux. you need a PCI card to connect to your phone line(s).
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk
http://www.asterisk.org

FrankGrimes wrote:

As you seem to be a man (or woman!) in the know on home automation: I ran in speaker cables (the white ones) from my hi-fi point in living room to the attic so they could be used for ceiling speakers in the bedrooms if needs be (I also ran them to all other rooms too). What would I need to do to get the hi-fi to play certain music say in the bedroom?

Firstly, it's Man thanks very much

Nice thinking ahead on the speaker cables.

Multi room audio is the bane of my life There are lots of ways to do it
The main issues are
- what type of music source(s) you've got. Do you just want to be able to put on a Cd in the living room and listen in the kitchen/bedroom. Or do you have 100Gb of mp3s like I have. Does video come into the equation?
- do you want full control from the remote location. You'll definitely want to turn the speakers off or change the volume, but will you want to change the cd or change to a different input.

If you want to be able to put on a cd in the living room and listen in the bedroom for example, then you just need some gadgets from maplin like speaker switches like this one maplin http://tinyurl.com/7d3sb. You can buy little on/off and volume control switches, which you could put in each room. You get very little control with something like this. You can't change song or source from the remote location.

There are multi input - multi output amplifiers available, that are quite expensive.
http://www.russound.com/r1250mc.htm
http://www.smarthome.com/8270ced.html (this has a nice remote control in each zone, so you can select the source, and the volume)

Dedicated multiroom audio systems are available, that are much more intelligent, and cost a fair bit too. The fally basically into two groups - traditional music sources, like dvds/cd/tv, and digital media.

For digital media Sonos is highly regarded. It connects to your music server, or network attached storage over wired or wireless. You can have up to 32 zones and add on zone players when you can afford it. There's a good review here at the moment...
http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/
http://www.sonos.com

Others in the genre are
Squeezebox
Opus
http://www.qed.co.uk/multiroom/index.html

another option is a Windows Media Centre PC, and some extender devices (of which the new xbox will be one). my preferred option would be an open source alternative like MythTV, which is also a PVR (like sky+) but also stores your pictures, mp3s, videos, etc. you can have many frontends connecting to a single backend, if you wish. You can alternatively chip an xbox or two, and run XBMC (xbox media center, not to be confused with the official ms version).

a few people i know of have a central server, and several xboxes streaming content over ethernet.

for the more traditional sources, you could put in something by linn or bang & olufsen who have been doing multi room stuff for years.

FrankGrimes

Thanks again patrido.

I actually have just built a Windows Media Centre PC and have bought two HP extenders at half price in the US (minute scratches) and will get an Xbox 360 soon. Thing with these is they need a TV to control it which I won’t have in say back bedroom or the bathroom though I’d still like music there. A speaker switch like you suggest might be the man for me, have you any knowledge of decent wireless IR transmitters that would allow me to use a remote in another room to control the hi-fi output?

Unfortunately its too late to put in volume controls in each room as I don’t have the wires run and its all plastered now.

Yeh, that Sonos thing looks particularly good, but as most of my budget is gone on MCE stuff I’m just looking for a cheap and cheerful way of getting audio to the remaining rooms not covered by MCE.

I love MCE so far but tbh I only have the basics setup and am having trouble getting my NTL digital setup and the EPG also but I think once I get those sorted it’ll be class, specially with the ability to have one person in the PC room surfing web and others elsewhere pulling data from that machine.

Tech Overhaul

Thanks for all that advice. I'll be going for the wired option as I will have a lot of concrete walls so wireless will have too much interference. Thanks for all the links patrido. Does Anybody know where to get multi core cable (2 cat5e and 2 coaxial cable). I found some here but the price seems stupidly high compared to the US

patrido

FrankGrimes wrote:

have you any knowledge of decent wireless IR transmitters that would allow me to use a remote in another room to control the hi-fi output?

not really, i've heard people talk about lirc and irblaster, which are probably linux based software for controlling it. ir gear seems to be used a lot in ha, so google should find lots for you

patrido

Wizard Archer wrote:

Thanks for all that advice. I'll be going for the wired option as I will have a lot of concrete walls so wireless will have too much interference. Thanks for all the links patrido. Does Anybody know where to get multi core cable (2 cat5e and 2 coaxial cable). I found some here but the price seems stupidly high compared to the US

hometronics is the only place i've seen it and it is stupidly priced.

if you want the very best you could put in FT100 or FT125 coax and Cat5e or Cat6 FTP - all of which are foil shielded, for half the price of the combined cable. and despite the blurb, it's not that much hassle to run the cables seperately.

patrido

patrido wrote:

not really, i've heard people talk about lirc and irblaster, which are probably linux based software for controlling it. ir gear seems to be used a lot in ha, so google should find lots for you

i lied

found this today while looking for tv distribution amps.
http://www.cyberselect.co.uk/category/19

Lots of cool stuff there including Av over cat 5.

towbar

Anybody used EIB (European Installation Bus) for home automation lighting control?

Experiences and what cable did you use CAT5 or EIB cable.

kennykeno1

Hi All

I am wiring my house in the coming weeks. I am in the building game but do not know much about Smart Sound, intelligent homes, etc. Can you advise what to do and who to get? I hear Smart Homes.ie will cost an arm and a leg. Could I just get my sparks to put in cat6 surround sound etc. Its just cable at the end of the day.

delly

kennykeno1, don't bump old threads and don't cross post the same message on multiple threads.