New Home Automation?

Posted by Unknown on Monday January 13, 2014 @01:32PM from the color-changing-lights-and-infinity-mirrors-everywhere dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ok, fellow geeks... I have the luxury of finally building my dream home from scratch. It's going to be good sized (~4000 sq ft over 3 levels), and rather than run around at night to make sure my lights are off, doors are locked, garage is closed, etc, I really want to put in a home automation system. Since the walls aren't up, this is the time for complete flexibility as to my options. The last time I did a whole house, it was years ago, X10. Since then, lots of other protocols, both 'proprietary' and more general (like WiFi) have come on the market for devices — all better than what I've worked with in the past. What do you all have experience with and recommend as reliable, secure, and fairly easy to use? Something with a good chance for long term availability of parts and features would be a bonus."

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conduit in anticipation by EthanBernard · 2014-01-13 13:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

Place thin wall plastic conduit, as big a diameter as you can fit, within the walls between rooms in anticipation of whatever future technology you might have to route through there.
1. Re:conduit in anticipation by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · 2014-01-13 14:01 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  And start by running two CAT-5 and two coax cables to each WALL in every room. Yeah. Yeah wireless... Yeah, whatever. Run the cables.
2. Re:conduit in anticipation by immaterial · 2014-01-13 14:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  If he's running conduit there's no reason whatsoever to run all those unnecessary cables through it. The whole point of conduit is it makes it possible to pull whatever you need if and when you need it. I have conduit to at least three walls of each room in my house but I've only pulled cat 6 and tv cable to the specific walls I need at the moment. Why waste the money installing useless cable?