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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?"
This is a placeholder, i will be referencing this when the dupe is posted.
Bricks you fool, bricks!
Put TV jacks in every room except bathrooms. I mean it, every room. You never know when the location of your TV will change.
Le français vous intéresse?
How about leaving an empty conduit so you can snake additional cabling (Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre, etc) for future expansion. Everything leads down to a central location in the basement so that you set that up as the location where the server, TV (cable or satellite), telephone are centrally located.
Panic now, beat the rush!
No, thats a good thing. If you want outside reception, you can buy an outside antenna. Otherwise it is good to keep the signal inside your house and safe from evil wardrivers (and your stupid neighbor trying to log into to your porno network share and deleting all your Asian...Yes, Bill, I know it was you!)
Shhhh! No one has told him yet, but he's the first little piggy.
It's not quite like that. We almost used strawbale construction before going with a different product (Polysteel) instead. Straw construction is very strong, makes for very thick walls, provide excellent insulation, and is relatively cheap. The straw is bound together in their bales and the whole wall sealed in plaster/concrete/etc. This makes the area they're in dry with no moisture, and hence no mold.
Ferretman
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Supply your in-ground sprinkler system with liquid propane and wire it to motion detectors.
And please put it on a webcam so we can watch.
Dry with no moisture, you say? Impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the rare dry with moisture :-)
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Friend of mine did that. His house burned down, and he didn't care. Thought it was cool. Neat lights, lotsa warmth, and the Red Cross brought him some munchies later on. Then he had a nap. When we woke up, we told him his house went home, and he was like okay with that.
Straw bale houses are usually finished with stucco, which has been a popular exterior for a long long time.
How much lateral force does a typical home get exposed to? These straw bale houses have survived for over 60 years, and some from the 1800s are still standing in Nebraska. They're strong enough, and obviously they don't dissolve in the rain.
WTF are you talking about?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I am a pro. Use 3/4 inch conduit to all data/phone jacks. I like to put one next to every electrical outlet. Electrical outlets are almost always 1/2 inch conduit. Three twelve gauge wires fit easily into a 1/2 pipe and 12 guage will carry twenty amps. It's pretty rare to find an outlet that feeds more than twenty amps. You 'utility room' will have your hot water heater, electric load center and a wall mount rack for networking/AV gear. I like wall mounted because it keeps it out of the water. If you home run all your conduit then you're going to have one heck of a junction box. I like to mount it right above the server rack. Usually at least 12"x12"x6". In a traditional built dwelling I like a 1.5 - 2 inch conduit into both the attic and the crawl space. In a straw bail construction the south wall is usually the corridor/window wall for passive solar heating. I would run the big conduit pipe to there so it's easy to pull in stuff that got forgotten earlier. Try to design a drop ceiling for that front corridor, you can hide quite the cabling nightmare in that. :)
For a new construction, it is silly to install Cat5. Cat5 limits you to 100 MBit/s, the current standard. Unless you want to re-install all cables within the next five years, you should at least install Cat6, which allows using Gigabit Ethernet (10 and 100 MBit/s still work on that cable). You should install some spare cables, so you can add further wall sockets or replace broken cables without having to open walls. Just install two cables whereever you need one cable. And install cable pairs not only in one corner of each room, use two to four different places, depending on the size of the room. Unlike conventional Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet uses all four pairs in the cable, so there are no longer unused pairs in the cable that could be used for a second device or as a replacement pair. You should use tubes so you can replace the cables later. You should have a small room with a little 19 inch rack for servers, switches, and patch panels. Your initial plan should not fill more than 50% of the rack.
For a lot more of good tips, search for "structured cabling".
By the way: It is no problem to use Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6 or even Cat7 for ISDN or analoge telephone lines, and you should do this. It gives you a lot more flexibility. There are even solutions to drive video and audio signals over Cat5 or better, and depending on the quality of the cable, it should be possible to drive antenna or cable tv signals over Cat6 or Cat7, using an impedance adapter on each end.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.