You’re pre-wiring a new addition in your home…

Posted under A Geek Dad's Life, Blog Posts, Quitting Cable

And now it’s time to answer our viewer mail:

Hi Scott,

I was wondering if I could get some A/V system advice from you?  We are putting an addition on our house and will have some walls and ceilings opened up so I was looking at upgrading/adding to our system while it has easier access. 

The big question I have is what wiring to run so we are set up for a number of years in the future.  Do I want to run coax, cat5 and HDMI everywhere or is that overkill?  My ultimate goal would be to set up a distribution system to share signals through most of the house. 

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  If you need more details let me know.

Hi [name withheld],

Ask for advice, and you shall receive it until you cry for mercy.

Yes, you should do a "home run" distribution, whereby each/all of your cables run back to a common point.  Fancier configurations (i.e. trunk & branch, loop-through, etc.) are only required for large facilities and long distances, or for people in small facilities who enjoy making things ridiculously over-complicated.  "Home Run" distributions offer greater flexibility and are easy to troubleshoot. 

(MUCH more advice after the jump…)

I’d recommend running coax and CAT5/7 to as many drops as you can, and double up where it makes sense.  While 802.11x wireless is great for those hard-to-reach places, wired connections are preferable for fixed-placement devices.  We use wireless exclusively for our laptops, but many TVs, BluRay players, and all game consoles are becoming network-enabled.  You might want a couple of RJ45 connections behind a kid’s entertainment center, and you’ll need a 4-port network hub behind your main entertainment center.  Cable is cheap, and you can always install the jacks/receptacles later (a surprisingly expensive part of the job at $3-$5 per drop).

Coax will also remain a valuable type of cable for quite a while, so you should also run it to a couple of walls in each room.  Cable companies will continue to use coax to distribute analog and digital signals for several (6?) more years, and people receiving over-the-air broadcasts will continue to use it indefinitely.  If you set up a centralized DVR/media playback channel in your house, you will likely use coax to distribute the signal to all of your TVs. 

Interesting note: We have cancelled our subscription to cable TV and now use free over-the-air TV broadcasts distributed through our house via coax.  See our story at http://www.unthinkability.com/?cat=17

Before you put up the drywall, don’t forget any surround sound cabling that you might want to use later.  There are some wireless satellite surround sound speakers on the market, but they would still require power.

HDMI is not a long-distance technology.  New remote display technologies will probably utilize some form of wireless and RJ45 connections (see http://www.engadget.com/search/?q=wireless%2Bhdmi).  If you want to mount a flat-panel TV on a wall and completely hide all of your cables while still remaining flexible for new connector types in the future, you should plan your TV placement in each room and run a big conduit from the viewing height to the floorboard for power/audio/video.  Remember that (if you are connecting the TV to local devices like a DVR, game console, or surround sound system) you will need to fit the power cable AND the connectors through the conduit, so the conduit will need to be extra wide with no tight bends.  You will pull your cables through the conduit when you are ready.  Finish the prep work with a large/quad junction box and cover the top with a framed picture, and cover the bottom with a vent grill until you install a TV.  You could buy a fancy-schmancy HDTV terminal faceplate for your wall, but who is to that say the connectors won’t be obsolete in a couple years?

Some other notes and advice:

• When planning your CAT5/7 cable drops, be sure to include one for a wireless access point easily accessible in a closet, cabinet, or a drop ceiling.
• Find a common distribution point for all of your cables.  Be prepared for a bit of a rat’s nest until you can cut your cables to length and tie them down. (I’m too embarrassed to show you mine.)
• You could also pick a single common network node on one side of your house to concentrate that side’s network and RF cables, and then run a single RF trunk and a network backbone from that side to you main network location.
• LABEL YOUR CABLES as you pull them.  Numbers are ok if you have a diagram, but descriptions are WAY better ("living room east", "kitchen north")
• When you are ready to start connecting the new RF/TV drops, find a friend in the Cable TV world to help you select your RF fittings and connections.  You’ll need to plan out the splitter and tap values to balance the amount of RF signal to each drop.
• You cannot splice network cables together.
• You must use RF splitters or taps to combine coax cables.
• Do NOT put any splitters or connectors behind the drywall. They can spontaneously fail, especially during lightning storms.
• CAT5/7 maximum length will not be an issue in your house, so you can run them each/all back to your main network switch(es).

Good luck.  Sounds like a fun project!

Better you than me.