Electronic Gadget Ideas for a New House?

pmadden asks: "I'll be building a house this summer (standard straw bale construction, earth plaster, the whole low-tech gig). Naturally, I'll be putting gobs of ethernet in the walls, with drops to the rooms, on the roof, and so on. I'll add wireless too, once it's secure enough to keep all of you out. What gadgets should I plan for, so that I don't have to do a major retrofit? I'll have cables for TPZ cameras, for when they get super-cheap. We'll leave niches for putting in routers and stuff like that. What else? What cool thing will be cheap in a couple of years, leading my wife to ask, 'why didn't you plan for that'? Any recommendations for good Christmas light control systems, and so on?"

Comments

Air ducts

[mboverload]

Have two air ducts availiable where your comptuer will be. Then you can pipe the hot air from a rear fan and PSU outside. Even better, you could also attach ducts to the front for ice-cold computing during the night or winter.

Not really gadget-related, but:

[koreaman]

Put TV jacks in every room except bathrooms. I mean it, every room. You never know when the location of your TV will change.

not hight tech but....

[johnpaul191]

my uncle was just in town recently and had the plans to the house he is building. they are putting sockets under the roof overhangs just for christmas lights and they will all go to one or two switches. on one hand it seems silly, but on another it makes a world of sense.

as for everythng else maybe you want to try to keep some conduit space open for the future. honestly who knows what we will be using for TV or internet in even just a few years. will everyone have fibre in the house? will coax be gone? will CAT5 cable be old? is today's CAT5 cable going to be good enough for tomorrow's speeds? i don't know how much it matters in a house setup, but cable is rated for speed.

you might as well plan for ethernet everywhere. wireless is easy, but ethernet is cheap to do from the start. if you put something along the lines of an Audrey http://audreyhacking.com/ in the kitchen, it would be nice to have the wires ready to go.

Re:What to do

[Piquan]

Another good idea: run a string along the conduit. That way, when you have to pull something later, you can pull it on the string (along with a new string). Easier than using fishtape, and (in my not-so-experienced opinion) less concern about cracking fiber.

When you're choosing the conduit's thickness, don't forget that you're likely to have some runs with some thick bits of cable; for example, your home entertainment center may eventually have RG6 (for the TV cable), cat5 and/or fiber (for the home entertainment PC and/or TiVo), four pairs of speaker wire (to the 7.1 system's surround speakers), a stereo pair of audio signal wires (to the house music distribution panel), plus some stuff I haven't considered. You'll need some more room in the bends to make sure that there's plenty of space and cables don't get kinked; cable kinking can do icky things to signals even when it doesn't affect DC.

I'm no architect, so I don't know how much your choice of building materials here is going to affect fire risk. Talk to a pro to make sure that the conduit doesn't make your home into a firetrap (by channeling fire to all the house walls quickly). You may need to use plenum cables at some points. But again, I'm not a pro.

Re:Wire for DC!

[wronskyMan]

Not a good idea- the reason high voltages are used is power=voltage*current, so for a given device, a higher voltage will mean a lower current; since resistive losses are poroportional to the square of the current, you will need MUCH thicker wires for DC (on the order of 1/2"). For example, common household 120V circuits are reated at 15A; if your computer uses 15A@12V from its power supply, this means only 1.5A@120V is needed, letting you use 8-9 computers (theoretically) on the same circuit, whereas if you ran DC, you would need a separate circuit for each computer or very thick wiring.