Home Entertainment

[#1]

My brother and his wife decided to redo their entire home.  Today they have a 3 bedroom ranch home.  They are expanding their home to include a second floor in addition to moving the gargage and making the old garage additional living space.

The house will be in the shape of a L.  One leg of the L will be the living space.  The other leg of the L will be a 3 car garage.

There is also a finished basement.

Now that the second floor and roof is up (less any dry wall) my brother wants to wire his home.

Since he has a clean slate and the freedom to do whatever he wants I wanted to get suggestions about what he should be doing for running Ethernet cables, COAX, phone lines etc.

My inital thoughts are to run a Cat 6 to each bedroom and to each TV location.  Each TV will also have a COAX.

His thoughts were to have his wireless router located at the corner of L on the second floor (where both legs intersect) but at this point I'm not sure if the coverage is sufficient to give him WLAN coverage throughout his home. 

Anyone have any thoughts about what they would do to wire their home when you have all the walls open and have the freedom to do as you wish now.

Thanks, Jim

[#2]

You can't be too rich, too skinny, or have too much Cat 6 running through your home. I'd concur with running it to every room.

You can send so much over Cat 6 these days that coax is becoming superfluous (and I'd rather have a "loss-less" digital signal over an analog signaly any day), but I figure the extra cost of running coax to the bedrooms probably is a good idea in a "belt and suspenders" sort of way.

I would not fret about the wireless access point placement. Access points don't cost much, and you can add one anywhere there is a wired network point. Putting the router in the corner of the "L" is a fine starting point, but you can take care of any dead or weak zones easily enough later on.

One thing to keep in mind is that you'll want to make your wiring closet accessible with room to expand. Good lighting and room to work are important. Figure on room for things like sturdy battery backup power supplies and new pieces of equipment, and make it convenient to the outside in the event you have to feed in a new connection to the outside world.

I hope your brother and his wife enjoy their new home.

All the best,

Alfred Poor

The Weekly Feature

[#3]

Having completed a similar project nearly 18 mo. ago... I followed Levition Structured Media Center recommendations. Using various Leviton modules, I have whole house sound, intercom, FiOS, off-air broadcast TV, internet and telephone.

I installed 2 CAT6, 2 COAX and 1 RJ12 in every room in a single low voltage gang box. Remember to run a 20A 120V outlet near this set-up to facilitate powered connections. In some of the rooms, I've installed 2 complete set-ups. I use 1 coax for FiOS and 1 coax for Off-Air Broadcast TV; I have nearly 50 channels of free TV in the Philadelphia area.

Everything terminates to one location in my basement within Leviton's Structured Media Panel. Also, I purchased a 24-port gigabit switch from provantage.com ($99) to handle the network traffic. Utilizing 1 port on the switch, using a crossover cable connected to verizon's router acting as the DHCP server. I configured an additional router at the opposite end of the structure to act as a wireless access point (DHCP turned off). I've named the Wireless connections xxxxx_B for basement and xxxxx_2 for 2nd floor.