What do you know about house "smart" systems and wiring?

[Fly320s]

We are in the initial stages of designing and building a custom home. If the budget allows for it, I want to wire the house for current and future "smart home" systems.  Things like an alarm system, internet, home network, cameras, controllable lighting and HVAC, TV/movie server, etc. It won't all get installed at once, but I want to be able to easily add functions in later.

I'm thinking Cat5 cable everywhere, but is that sufficient?  Is fiber optic a reasonable price and is it worth the extra cost? What about coax cable?  Any other cabling options out there?

Gimme some ideas you have.

[Balog]

Since you're looking at future upgrades, why run extensive cabling that may or may not work with future tech? Large diamter conduit with frequent accessible junction boxes is relatively cheap (compared to cabling). Not sure what residential code is like, but I'd think you could just use PVC conduit in a crawlspace or attic, with drops for each outlet etc.

[AmbulanceDriver]

My understanding is that low voltage (data/fiber/xyz) has to be separate from "real" wiring.  but as others have said, conduit is relatively cheap, I'd run my power through one conduit and have a second conduit for all my data drops.  Cat5e (for gigabit), video (coax and HDMI), audio, etc.   I think the largest conduit you can run in a 2x4 interior wall is 1" ID....   But I may be wrong there.   Run the largest conduit you can, with pull strings in place in addition to whatever wiring you're gonna have pre-installed.   

[AZRedhawk44]

Something that a lot of houses lack in regards to internal cabling, is a POP/MDF location.  Just a closet somewhere that is a reasonable place to put a cable modem and switch/wifi system that then also has a patch panel for the various runs all over the house.

It needs sufficient air flow that the cabinet doesn't overheat.

Something I've always hated about my home offices, has been sharing desk real estate with the cable modem and router/switch.



Otherwise, what ends up happening is you have a series of runs going from whatever becomes the office and has the cable modem, out to the living room and to other bedrooms, and you end up with a multiport (or several multiport) RJ45 wall terminal(s) in the office, and a thick bundle of cabling crawling up to the back of your switch.  Unsightly and annoying.

[Balog]

Good point on having an MDF room.

Re conduit and power/data separation, just run big empty pipes above the ceiling (or somewhere accessible, NOT in the walls) with pull strings and frequent j-boxes. When/if you want to add capacity, punch a hole in the sheet rock and fish whatever cable you need at the time through the wall from the closest j-box. Put it in flex if you want, not sure what residential code is for drops.

[Nick1911]

Something that a lot of houses lack in regards to internal cabling, is a POP/MDF location.  Just a closet somewhere that is a reasonable place to put a cable modem and switch/wifi system that then also has a patch panel for the various runs all over the house.

It needs sufficient air flow that the cabinet doesn't overheat.

Agreed.  When I ran ethernet in the house, I decided to setup a dedicated home for networking crap.  I fabbed up a 19 inch rack, and screwed it to the basement wall, ran the house wiring to a punchdown panel and jumpered from there to my switch.  I chose the basement because it remains cool, has good access to the wall cavities of the floor above, and the sound/wiring mess isn't objectionable there.



If I were building a house, I would run PVC conduit for data/com lines.  Houses last much longer then tech, it's likely that these lines will need replacement and/or service throughout the life of the house.

[never_retreat]

I vote for conduit everywhere. One the second floor run them all to the attic, one the first floor run them to the basement.

As far as automation for lighting, thats going to be difficult. Many on the dimers are centrally located and then the controllers are low voltage.
So the wire feeding your ceiling light would have to go to the dimmer pack not the wall switch.
I only did this once for a basement remodel for a friend, I don't remember the name of it but it was made by lutron.
That takes more four thought than pipe for data.

[Fly320s]

Good ideas on the conduits and pull strings.

[AmbulanceDriver]

Fly, my brother is the project manager for his company for home/business automation for his company.   If you want me to, I can kind of pick his brain a bit regarding what you might have in mind.

-Jon

[AZRedhawk44]

Just FYI, something to keep in mind is most home innernetz and internal network systems work just dandy at wi-fi speeds, and wi-fi will continue to evolve in a way that it will just about always be sufficient for home networking speeds.  As such, if you have one or two good wi-fi access points in your home connected by a Cat5e backbone between them, you're gonna be good to go for just about any computer usage tasks you can dream up.

I've got a gigabit run from my office to my living room through the attic, and access points using the same SSID and password (but different channels) at both locations.  The net result is I can walk all the way around my property, from the detached workshop way in the back corner of the yard, to the front of the driveway by the mailbox, and keep streaming netflix with no interruptions as the access points seamlessly hand-off between each other based on signal strength.  I can go way out to the end of my cul-de-sac and still remain connected to my home wi-fi network.

With some lower powered devices I have trouble... I have a cheap Android tablet that has troubles from time to time with signal strength, and I'm thinking about putting a wi-fi repeater in my workshop to amp the strength out there for that particular device.

But you don't really need a gigabit run for every device in your home.  A jack in the living room, a jack in the office, maybe one more in one of the more remote parts of the house where wi-fi may not reach all the way from a different access point... that's about it.  Unless you're doing some serious iSCSI, network file ripping, disk imaging or other high bandwidth tasks.

[Tallpine]

Our single Linksys wireless reaches clear down to the RV site, about 50 yards from the house.  And the router is in the opposite corner of the house.

The only trouble is that campers block the signal with sheet metal, so you have to be next to a window.

[Fly320s]

Would a typical wifi router handle streaming videos from a home server while also handling standard internet traffic? Can I watch a movie and surf APS at the same time?  Doing that in my current set-up causes lag issues.

Ideally, I'd like to load all of our DVDs onto a dedicated computer/server for easy viewing and then be able to send videos to different areas on demand.

Can current wifi routers be reasonably secure?

I like the ease of wifi connections, but I don't want to have to constantly change batteries on remote devices such as security systems.

[Marnoot]

The new 802.11ac routers (assuming you have 802.11ac wireless adapters on your devices) will handle streaming HD video (by HD I mean recorded HD broadcast TV, full bitrate bluray rips, etc.) just fine. Wireless N can do so, but if you don't have a very, very good signal it can struggle.

[AZRedhawk44]

Would a typical wifi router handle streaming videos from a home server while also handling standard internet traffic? Can I watch a movie and surf APS at the same time?  Doing that in my current set-up causes lag issues.

Ideally, I'd like to load all of our DVDs onto a dedicated computer/server for easy viewing and then be able to send videos to different areas on demand.

Can current wifi routers be reasonably secure?

I like the ease of wifi connections, but I don't want to have to constantly change batteries on remote devices such as security systems.

I've got a plex server running on a Diskstation DS211j.  I can stream off that while watching anything I've ripped to it just fine, and if the attention deficit urge takes me, start watching YouTube clips or something on my laptop while watching things off the media server simultaneously with no problem.  The DS211j does have a gigabit interface on it and is plugged into my gig switch, as well as my Samsung bluray player with plex client software on it, so I get full gig bandwidth between those devices due to my gig trunk going from my office to my living room.  However, I also have the plex client (as well as generic DLNA client capability) on my laptops and android devices, and I can walk around and with a good wi-fi signal I can stream off the DS211j anywhere on my property with no lag issues.  My android tablet has problems sometimes but that's due to what seems to be a crappy wi-fi card in that particular device rather than my network, since my laptops have no problems anywhere.

Look into a Synology Diskstation.  I'm getting ready to upgrade my DS211j to a more powerful unit... probably a 412+ but possibly a 413.  The 412+ has much more CPU power for doing on the fly transcoding if there's a playback codec issue on the client device, and has 2 more bays than my current little device, as well as a gig of RAM rather than my pittance of 128MB. 

Even the tiny little DS211j has been an awesome unit, though.  Does a lot more than I would have considered possible from a 1.2ghz ARM processor and 128MB system.  I've tested doing multiple streams from the DS211j, and I've gotten 3 different clients playing 3 different shows with no problems, two of them wifi and one on gigabit wired, no issues.  I'm reasonably certain I could handle 5-6 simultaneous streaming connections at a 480p bitrate, 3-4 at 720p.  A system with 4 drives rather than 2 would have considerably more IO power and probably could handle a dozen or more simultaneous streaming media connections.

Wireless security... I run MAC address exclusion on my wireless network.  If your MAC isn't in my allow list, you're not getting on wireless.  As well as WPA2.  It ain't bulletproof, but I've yet to detect anyone compromising my network.

The new 802.11ac routers (assuming you have 802.11ac wireless adapters on your devices) will handle streaming HD video (by HD I mean recorded HD broadcast TV, full bitrate bluray rips, etc.) just fine. Wireless N can do so, but if you don't have a very, very good signal it can struggle.

Most of my media is stored at 720p quality, and I stream it wirelessly to client devices over 802.11n in the back half of the house via that access point, and 802.11g in the front half of the house on a separate access point.  No problems from either AP.  Bandwidth graphs when running 3 devices show the Diskstation is using about 20-25mbit per second throughput of its gigabit interface.  The bottleneck is the disk IO system, which on this RAID1 system will probably serve a maximum of 40mbit on such a low powered CPU.

[Marnoot]

Wireless N doesn't struggle at 720p on stuff I've tried either. 1080p is another story, keep in mind 1080p has over twice the pixels of 720p. The difference is greater yet if your 720p files were re-encoded via Handbrake, etc., which is why I specified broadcast TV and full bitrate bluray rips.

With a good signal I think it would have worked fine for me with N, but the 3-of-5 bars I got going from my basement to up where the TV is couldn't cut it when I tried using N for the purpose.

[tokugawa]

 Conduit would be a good idea, does not limit you on cable type or use.

 
 
  This is a great time to work on security aspects of your house. Like wall construction, entry points, etc.
 

[RoadKingLarry]

Would a typical wifi router handle streaming videos from a home server while also handling standard internet traffic? Can I watch a movie and surf APS at the same time?

I'm kind of doing that right now. Streaming a movie off of Netflix (SD, I don't have anything to play HD stuff on), surfing APS and the wife is in her office booking the face. This is off of a 1.5MBP/S DSL connection through an older WiFi router.

[InfidelSerf]

Fly I have pretty much the exact setup your describing. I'll post some pics and more details later.
We had just a few days before sheetrock was to be hung to make our wiring decisions. I wish I would have had more time, but only to plan for speakers and a few more drops.

I have the whole house hardwired for security, connected to an HAI OmniIIe controller.
Everything is fully automated and accessible via iwhatevers and the interwebs.
As money allows I'm replacing switches and outlets with UPB switches to add lighting control to the mix.

I had them run HDMI, cat5, cable and 120v outlets 70" up the wall in 6 locations incl the patio. With an additional cat5 run with the HDMI for RF repeaters.
They are run in "smurftube" flexible conduit. (But I can't fish anything else through because the HDMI is just too thick.)
The HDMI cables were expensive due to the length. 
In hindsight I would probably go with HDMI over cat5. 
I would also run one or two more cat five cables for future use.

All of these terminate in my office closet (had them move it from the original planned location of the master closet)
There I have a splitter and switch rigged up to all the HDMI cables.
I primarily use a PS3 on it because the Bluetooth remotes work beautifully even though my office is on the third floor main living room is on the first. I run PS3 MediaServer on a dedicated pc and it feeds to all the screens in the house.

As for bandwidth usage and performance. Your ISP plan will have alot to do with that.
I think we have 25Mbit. With a teenager running xboxlive I can still run netflix without a glitch and surf the web on all our devices.

If I were to do it again I would run wiring for speakers before the sheetrock.
I would run an extra smurftube (or whatever conduit your budget allows) to locations, as well as a few extra runs of cat5.  Looks it's by far the cheapest cabling and numerous technologies run off it. Just be sure its rated for PoE.
Most future stuff will be wireless. Or the more likely reality you will have moved on from the house before your ever going to need to upgrade it from the tech we are talking about here.
Software and creative programming makes your system do all the really cool stuff. And that's just boring time spent with your system.

[tokugawa]

Be sure to use quality wire.  I ran all sorts of speaker wire thorough the house and 6 years later when I went to put in the sound system, the wire had all completely corroded inside the clear vinyl.
 This stuff was sold by a high end audio store, but apparently it came from the PRC.