The house is about 60 feet long. Everything runs to a 4 foot wall-mount patch panel. We tried to put the panel as close to the center of the house as possible to keep the runs shorter. That puts the longest cable around 100 feet. It is all cross connected and split there. Only ports that are being used are 'live'. There are two coax and two cat 5e ports in every wall outlet and two outlets per room plus outlets where necesssary. All-in-all we've got over 5000 feet of low voltage wire in that house on the first floor alone. That included 4 zone audio with volume controls.
Here's a small system that I did last week. It had probably in the realm of 4000 - 6,000 feet of LV cable. Things get real hairy when we start having all of the equipment in the mechanical room instead of at each TV location. Did a house a few weeks ago that had 6 on wall TV's, each with 7 RG6, 2 Cat5e, and 3 22/4 shielded running from the location to the mech room. IR distribution so you can control all the devices in the mech room from the TV location. Also had 8 zones of whole-house audio, in wall-Video touch panels to control 3 of those zones (pulls up metadata from songs, etc... on the panel as well as play any media that's showing on the tv) I wish I had a picture of the head end. It was a stupid amount of cable. Filled up a 5 foot equipment rack, as well as a 36" in wall ELAN can.
Going to fill it with more later. Plus I got the rack for $10. They haven't decided to go with DISH yet, but later we'll put the stuff in the rack and use IR repeaters. We've since put in a booster, splitter, switch, dsl modem, firewall, power strips and such. It's filling up. We could have gone with a bigger rack.
Ack, the last thing I want to see this week is cable! Working on introducing some cable management to two HIGHLY neglected distribution cabinets at work. We're talking about 800 ports of gigabit ethernet patched. The cable was laying on the floor and you could barely access anything. I'll have to post a before/after photo, it's amazing what a difference you can make with some simple routing kits.
Haven't gotten that far yet. Whatever we do, we'll be using an unused cat5e run from upstairs to downstairs just to keep it clean.
All of our wall plates are dual gang. One half is power and the other half is low voltage. Apparently, sheetrock guys like to charge for every hole cut in the rock. So instead of two side by side, just cut one and fill it with this. The decora plate on the left is configurable up to 6 connections.
I'm moving the posts to this discussion. It's great information, but it shouldn't be in the FS forum.
This is all being done on an existing home I take it? Sounds like you took the bull by the horns! Have you thought about Directv? Their newer HD boxes are RF and IR I believe. I pretty sure their new HD content is live now, too.
If you want directTV let me know. Ill put you in contact with our directv guy. He does all our houses, and does great work. Add 4 rg6 and one ground wire in a run up to the attic and coil up like 30 feet in the attic. I also just retroed my townhouse. Directv dvr wiring to the four places its needed. (2 rg6 and an ethernet/phone line). Small setup, but is a perfect setup for the house. Next step is whole house audio controlled by in-wall touchscreens, and distrobution from my dvd server to all tv's
No, We did run the wires when the walls were bare studs. We ran it in a way that allowed us plenty of slack in case the ends ever needed to be redone. It also kept the low voltage wire away from the high voltage stuff. This keeps the interference to a minimum.
I've got at least 6 RG-6 cables going up there. The ground wire isn't a problem, that can be added at any time. Depending on how big of a ground wire you need, each dual coax has a tracer wire on it that could be used.
By the way. For A/V cables, check out MonoPrice Their prices are the best around, and product is second to none. (they're the same company as www.ehdmi.com) I got my 50 foot HDMI cable which does successfully pass 1080p for $80
I ran about 2.5 250' spools of bundled 2xRG6Q+2xCat5e in our house, so that's around 1250' of RG6Q plus I also ran at least another 500' of plain RG6Q. Everything in smurf tube so I can pull it and run new stuff when standards change Pre-wired 6.1 in the living room, pre-wired sound in kitchen and all four bedrooms. I used to do structured wiring installs in new construction, probably did well over 100 homes, then our company (sub) lost the contract and I didn't really want to move to the company that picked it up (largely because we lost the contract due to the fact that we insisted wiring to code, while the main contractor figured because nobody was inspecting lovo in residential yet, that they could do whatever they wanted. So the new guys were willing to do crap work.) My main panel in the basement is a mess though. I hate it because I always did the cleanest installs in the world (they used my installs in training photos), but I never seem to have the time to get my own into shape. All the video and data drop into a 42" can, and I think I need to add a second of at least 28" to really clean things up. And I think my security system has to move out of the 14" it came in to at least a 28 to do wire management the way I want. And the damn video distribution amp got friend in a lightning storm mid-summer. But making my truck run and clearing out the garage have priority.
Here's a pic of the latest version of my home theater equipment room. When I add the whole house distro, it will also be based out of this room. But when that time comes I'm going to have to invest in a real rack to put things in. Had to add a second harmony RF wireless extender since each one only has 8 memory banks for IR codes (plus another 7 for Z-Wave). I'm about ready to throw the harmony at the wall (read: sell it). It's a fine remote, just not for as complex a system I've got running. I'm going to be getting myself an RTI T3-V when it comes out. Much more in depth to program, and requires a dealer-only software, but much more powerful and customizable. And I have the software because of work.
