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Ask Slashdot: If You Were Building a New Home, What Cool New Tech Would You Put In?
An anonymous reader writes: I am starting the process of building a new home, and I would like to make the house as wired (or wireless) as possible. At this stage I can incorporate new tech in the design. What features do you have in your house that you just couldn't live without? What features are nice to have? What features do you want? In-home Fiber? Solar? Audio/Visual? Heating/Cooling?
Some sort of new device to keep people off my lawn. It couldn't be run IOS, Android, have a unified touch interface, or be in "the cloud" though.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I think you need HAL in a hidden room.
Wouldn't be slashdot without someone suggesting a Beowulf cluster.
We just don't know what the future holds. You may want to run fiber or a new wireless standard may make that moot. You may want to swap out your heating unit without much expense, or install a battery. I wouldn't focus on individual new technologies, but give the house an electrical and mechanical infrastructure that makes it easy and cheap to make changes. I would also install extra, easily accessed conduits for new cables or pipes of whatever kind.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Triple Pane Windows and Closed Cell Foam insulation.
http://fullypsyched.com/wp-con...
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
They aren't very cost effective for existing homes, but for new construction they can save you tons on money on heating and cooling, giving you up to a 5x multiplier for the energy you put in. All new construction should have them.
WiFi is evil. Ethernet is good. GBE is far better.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
So you can run other stuff later.
I'd like the outlets in my home to be retractable, similar to the way some vacuum cords work. Click a button to unlock it, and then pull it out of the wall for ~30 feet. Press another button to retract the cord back into the wall.
Can't believe this isn't standard equipment in new homes yet. WIFI is shit.
Had my place wired in 2005 with 5e. I take it for granted there is 1Gbps in every room. Now I'm moving and the 9 year old house has nothing but fucking phone wiring and coax like it's 1975 or something.
Well, if you redefine well the concept of "one" and "first", then you are right. Or simply a moron.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Window mounted 50cal machine guns.
A fridge is better. No need for an ice maker, no need for a tablet nor the IoT.
You put your beverages in the fridge and won't get any washed soda any more.
You just need what you already have and a little bit of planning.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Fiberglass windows, geothermal heat, a good in home battery like the new Tesla product, wind and solar power generation, and wicked good insulation. Ideally something like the blow cellulose or cotton fiber, but even just a thicker layer of fiberglass, so that my heating and cooling needs are few. LED lighting throughout. Tankless water heaters. Natural gas for heating, cooking, water heater and dryer.
Drought tolerant landscaping. Because even though I live in a water rich region, I hate having to pay to water my lawn (city water, no options) just for the priviledge of cutting it later. Nuts to that deal.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
Here is my quick list:
- 80' holographic TV with 360 channels 4D surround sound
- Two parking spots for the hovercars
- A quantum teleporter (ask for the free subscription to Andromeda Quantum Tours Weekly)
- A six terawatt home battery and thorium / fusion nuclear reactor (don't go for the cheap Tesla stuff, nuclear is what you need)
- A robosquid and a set of batteries
- Six packs of pills for instant beer
- An iPhone9 with the Apple Watch, Apple Pay, Apple ID, Apple Travel, iThink, assortment of overpriced cases, cables and chargers
- At least one DNA decoder / recoder per room
- A 65536-qbit game console for the kid
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
I would try to get my heating and cooling costs as low as possible. Something similar to the Passivhaus standard. I might not be strict to the standard if the cost benefit becomes too extreme. I would probably also use some sort of geothermal system as well.
When the power goes out, it would be nice to have some sort of battery backup and/or renewable source of electricity on hand. I also like the EPA certified wood stoves that are now available, like those made by Quadra-fire. They're much more efficient than old fashioned stoves, and don't require electricity. However, their output is likely too high for a house that meets the Passivhaus standard.
What can I say, I work in the energy field. Saving energy is fun to me.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Biggest regret I have in my home is not having Cat 6, dual runs to every single room at a minimum. Punched down to a proper patch panel in a room somewhere you can stick servers. Cat 6 should last quite a while, and give you all sorts of possibilities. Wifi sucks, and should just be for portable devices. Copper will always carry more. Cat 6 allows the 1 gig of today, plus the higher speeds coming.
Then, I would also do in ceiling wifi with something like ubiquiti stuff (I did add that in since then) with their own copper runs and all linked together to provide seamless wifi. I have this now including outside access points.
With that, I think you will have infrastructure (given the ability to do POE) to do almost anything you want. I would skip home automation stuff as most of it is immature and changing standards. Most of it just ends up as 'gee whiz' stuff anyways. Only exception to that is a net controllable thermostat.
Wire runs. You can change cabling later or run new cabling if the runs are in place
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
nothing in nothing out.
How does this question relate to the legions of Slashdot readers who are living in their parents basement? Are you deliberately trying to demean them and their lifestyle? Have you no shame?
Why is Snark Required?
to buy the biggest chunk of land I could, Put up trees/super tall hedges all around, build a nice funky house in the middle and get the biggest cable/adsl/etc connection I could from any local small ISP. Then I pup up a huge pirate or penguin flag in the center so it would just stand above the trees so people would go WTF?
Then I would build a green house for hydroponics and grow my own food and weed.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If the house has an open attic or basement I'd do all 3/4" EMT conduit stubs for all services, be they power, data, whatever, so that there's no in-wall problems later. I'd attempt to anticipate the locations of televisions, speakers, computers, wireless access points, and anything else that might use a cable and plumb the necessary number and size of conduit for the necessary power and data requirements.
I'd install a central vacuum system. It could be used for cleaning and for a tech bench to clean up dust when working on things, and with a proper filter might make for a good soldering station to get the fumes away. I would also run 1/2" or 3/4" soft copper in a giant loop above each room, probably "K" or maybe "L" rated, that could be hooked to an air compressor for things like cleaning, airbrush panting, etc.
I'd define an MDF and run several service-entrance conduits from the expected service-hookup locations on the outside of the house, so that whatever subscribed, hard-line services come, there won't be a need to drill more. Probably 1" conduit.
I'd use all 20A circuits for all electrical outlets. Circuits would not cross rooms. Some rooms would get more than one if they have more than ten outlets.
I would completely skip on consumer-grade faucets. Chicago Faucets or T&S Brass everywhere.
Behind the main panel I would define a room that could be a battery/inverter room. It would be climate controlled.
I would plan on running Ethernet everywhere. I would install conduit to later let me place cameras on the outside of the structure if I was at-all concerned that they'd be needed.
I would look into those windows that are effective large single-pixel LCDs, so that one can turn-off the view by applying power to the window.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
15 years ago your recommendations would have been things like CAT5e
WTF?
5e still gets you bulletproof 1Gbps without glitchy, insecure WIFI. How is that somehow passé now?
Conduit from a central "network closet" to multiple places in each room (3 or 4) - It's future proof. Make sure a string is also ran long with the cables (especially if it's not point to point). The string makes pulling cables easy - just tie the cable and a new piece to the end and pull the other end.
Big conduit between the "network closets" on each floor.
I'd also run (4 conductor) power cables from the breaker box to each outlet/switch INDIVIDUALLY - no need to worry about not having enough power at an outlet; also doing things like home automation easier.
Also if you're having a fireplace w/ a mantle, put an outlet above the mantle (hidden) and run a conduit from above the fireplace (right above mantle) to somewhere (either network closet or space nearby) - never know when you'll want to put something AV related (or just needs power, eg christmas lights) on the mantle.
~Kenny
Some thoughts:
Wired Networking: Wireless can never touch the bandwidth, latency, or collision handling of wired networking. Provide wired access for all stationary devices, and use wireless only for those devices that are mobile or wireless-only by design (laptops, tablets, phones, WiFi lightbulbs, etc.). As much as possible, avoid wireless for things like smart TVs, set-top boxes, game consoles, etc. The more devices you have on wireless, they less bandwidth is going to be available to any one device. Unless you're going to invest in some pretty expensive networking gear, I'd stick with Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling for now (Cat 7 is budget isn't an issue), however, ensure you use some form of wiring duct behind the walls: should the day come when you can reasonably wire everything with fibre, it will be a whole lot easier to pull it through wiring duct than it is to remove all your walls.
Geothermal Heating/Cooling: Again, if you're not constrained by budget, invest in a Geothermal system for your heating and cooling. This often needs to be done rather early in the house design/build phase (due to the need to dig deep holes into the ground), but once in place you'll have nearly free heat in the winter and cooling in the summer (usually you just need to pay for enough electricity to run a heat pump and a fan, which is negligible). I'm fortunate enough to live in a home with community geothermal, and the system has been flawless for us (albeit not as cheap as a DIY system, as the community treats the turmoil energy as a utility. Still cheaper than the alternatives, however).
Solar: Even if you don't plan on installing a solar system (ha!) right away, I suppose you could at least get the basic wiring done, such that when it is time to install such a system you already have a suitable location for the banks of batteries (if you're building from scratch, this could be part of a custom utility room designed for this purpose), plus the necessary wiring between that location and your rooftop panels. That way you're future-proofed, and the rest would pretty much be plug-and-play.
Yaz
Beware of making your house too gadgety. In 10-15 years most of it will be outmoded and junk and you will spend a lot of time and hassle keeping it going (and if that is your schtick, why are you asking for ideas?!). Don't become a slave to your house if you can avoid it.
Nice to haves:
1) Extra outlets and breakers. Having fewer rooms per breaker is nice to avoid finding out that a hairdryer plus your gaming PC will pop the breaker even though one is upstairs and the other is downstairs.
2) Speakers and speaker wire in your living room is really nice, and hard to add later.
3) Pull Ethernet cable where you can do so. Most stuff will be on wireless, but it is nice to be able to put a wireless router where needed once you find out the hard way where the dead zones are.
4) Good insulation. A cheap house to heat/cool is golden. Consider a heat exchanger to keep fresh air in your house, which is a bigger issue once you make a well sealed up house.
5) Storage, storage, storage. No modern house seems to have enough good storage in it.
6) Good sound deadening in the interior walls, few houses have this, and it sucks to try and add after the fact. Solid core interior doors help too.
7) Glue and screw your base flooring in you minimize how many squeeks show up over time, which can slowly drive you insane.
8) Low maintenance yard. Mowing every week sucks. Paying for yard guys sucks. Allergies suck. Unless you want to be a gardener, put in slow growing low maintenance plants that don't trigger your allergies.
I built a custom home a few years ago.
A few tips:
- Cat6 everywhere. At least 4 near every TV/Receiver
- In wall/In ceiling speakers in all rooms These should be tied into setups for receivers in most rooms. For the dining room (if you have one), kitchen, patio, and other areas you wouldn't want a receiver, have them go to the basement. When you buy receivers, make sure they have a cat5 input so that you can control them remotely.
- Wire for central alarm system for fire alarms, burglar.
- Wire the front door for a video camera. You don't need to install it, but having the wiring done is a nice thing to have just in case.
- Run empty pipes to each room from the basement or attic so you can pull wire easier in the future.
- Have your basement ceiling be 1 foot higher than your first floor ceiling. It costs little to do in the planning stage, but makes the basement look humongous when you finish it.
- Just before they drywall everything, take pictures of every wall. This is your x-ray vision for the future.
- 240V/30A line to the garage. Who knows, you may get an electric car in the future.
- Have one closet on each floor which has a power outlet and cat6 cable.
- Central vacuum. Once you have it, you will never go back.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
nothing because it all breaks, just finished repairing Velux motorized blinds myself because the dealer wanted to replace them for $500 each and refused to repair them.
I always thought it would be awesome that all the forced air vents in rooms were remote controllable so you could only heat or cool the rooms were people are. seems like a no brainer.
If you want to go full-on nerdy, a pneumatic tube system can't go awry... ;) Bonus points if it connects to your mailbox. Extra bonus points if there's an outlet on your roof that you can fire things from.
"Who the **** put an emergency exit in the interrogation room?!" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
When my house burnt down 4 years ago we leveled what was left and started over from scratch. I looked into all the latest tech but the cost was astronomical for most high end tech stuff at that time! The only thing I did put in was nice theater surround in my living room. Splurge on the kitchen area and cabinets. Not cool at all but more re-sale value.
Make sure your house has a decently sealed envelope, and use a heat recovery ventilator to ventilate it. Saves a ton on electric bills, and is more comfortable. Also make sure it's decently insulated, for the same reason. This probably seems pretty pedestrian, but it will make a much bigger difference in your daily life than gadgets. That said, we also wired our house for environmental monitors (temperature, humidity, air quality), and that has been kind of cool, and we have energy sensors on every circuit in the house so we can see what the house is drawing (also cool). But these things are more curiosities than actually useful, unfortunately. I do make routine use of the weather station we installed outside. And I wired the house for cat6e shielded, which will handle ten gigabit ethernet. I never use it, but in theory it's damned cool. I would like to have a doorbell cam down at the garage, but haven't gotten around to installing it yet. Fortunately that can be a retrofit.
In-Wall speaker wire and other entertainment system wiring (with lines to a projector mount in the ceiling.).
12 Volt DC electrical wiring in addition to standard AC wiring. That way if you go Solar or Battery, you can keep your electrical systems from doing multiple wasteful conversions.
Ethernet wiring and Cable wiring. While wireless is handy, you need a good wired infrastructure to get your gear in to optimal places. Wired fixed equipment frees up your wireless bandwidth for your portable stuff (and is a bit more future proof since the wired standards are fairly well set).
Drains in the floors of rooms with water service. Much less flood damage when the washer or dishwasher breaks down somehow or a sink gets stopped up with the water forgotten.
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Does it make sense to do all of that energy efficiency stuff upfront? Or spread it out the installation over the years to maximize, uh, tax incentives?
It's hard to find a good resource... need updated versions of http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroo... that include the plug-in electric vehicle chargers and solar cells.
There are lots of weird restrictions... for example, you can get some energy efficiency credit for installing sunroofs in the ceiling only if they are attached to a home HVAC automation system so it adjusts the blinds and/or vents in concert with the air conditioning. Installing a manually-operated sunroof/blinds doesn't qualify!
We just bought a duplex built in the early 70s with mostly original (high quality but not high efficiency) appliances, and we're trying to budget out home improvements for the next 10 years. The roof needs to be replaced in the next 3 years, so we'd like to have enough saved to do a modest solar panel / sunroof install by then, but they'd probably wouldn't make much of a dent in our electric bill until we replace the appliances :P . Maybe an electric vehicle charger is in our future too, not for the next car but perhaps the one after that, but it's hard to plan for taking advantage of tax incentives that far into the future :/
Also have to improve our water efficiency somehow... we also live in a water rich region, but the water bill is easily the most expensive utility because the sewage / runoff water treatment is astronomical. It is nice to have urban lakes that are safe for swimming, though, so it's worth it.
Based on my past experience with remodeling my house, I recommend the following:
Install the following in every room, on at least 2 walls
- RG6 cable for TV. Use compression fittings
- Cat6 for both phone and network
- Use the Leviton (or off-brand) covers and keystone jacks to make everything look nice. This way you have cable, network, and phone in the same location.
- 4 gang outlets near every spot you put network/phone/cable
Purchase a pro-grade cable amp to deal with signal loss. Invest in a Leviton (or off brand) cabinet to hide and organize the wires. Invest in a patch panel for the network and phone as well as a switch for the network. If anyone tells you the future is wireless, their full of crap. You still need wires for cable and decent networking. If you're running cable, you might as well run two more wires for network and phone. If you don't need phone, then you're set with at least two network jacks.
Other handy things people have mentioned - large conduit in the walls for running audio or future cabling needs.
Remember that everything else with"smart" this or "smart" that will need to be replaced within 5 to 10 years of installing it.
As the power flows in, the screen grows warm, another day starts, I'm at work again...
I built a house many years ago and very carefully wired it with telephone wire terminated in standard D-blocks so I could run the Lantastic WAN system.
Then along came Wi-Fi.
I also pre-wired speaker wire into a second set of electrical outlets, which worked pretty well, actually. But today I would use conduit because, well, Lantastic was great, but....
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Cat 6, Cat 3 and Coax to every room. Cat 6 + power to a few closets for WiFi APs.
Structured wiring to a central ethernet/phone/TV distribution hub with media server, UPS, etc...
- The above can cost thousands of dollars if done professionally. My brother-in-law did it himself (before his house was drywalled) for a few hundred dollars.
Solotubes in the bathrooms (basically mini-skylights that collect enough light at night to act as a nightlight)
Hookup for solar - the tech isn't *quite* there yet.
Hookup for garage EV charger - see above.
Multiple passthroughs for wires going outside - for future expansion (ham radio antennas, sprinkler systems, whatever)
If you're really into gardening, a hookup for an outdoor sink (with warm water) is *really* nice.
A properly wired OTA TV/FM antenna - for cord cutting.
Depending on the size of the house - multiple thermostats.
IP thermostat with integrated humidistat to control the humidifier. I like the Nest.
An attic fan with a nice controller - won't live without one of these now - we can go for most of spring without A/C by just using the fan.
Metal roof - recommended by a roofer friend who has them on his house - if properly installed they will last practically forever.
If you don't want a security system, at least run some LV 2-wire to each window and door so you can add one later if you change your mind later.
Also run wiring for connected, powered fire alarms. At the very least - one in each bedroom, one in the kitchen, one in every stairwell and one in the furnace room.
Ideas from a local builder:
2x6 framing - allows for more insulation and is more durable.
16" poured reinforced concrete foundation - recommended by structural engineers as ideal for residential construction.
Remember this - building to code is like getting a C on a report card - you're doing the bare minimum to make sure the house won't fall apart, flood or catch fire.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
For office areas or dedicated A/V rooms, consider some type of raised flooring for easier cable management. If you have a workshop, do it in there to help with power distribution and dust collection.
The #1 thing I would have in new construction is zone water based floor heating. It is efficient and just plain feels great. It works well with geothermal or more conventional heating techniques.
Houses last a long time, tech moves much faster
Remember the houses of the 80s, pre-wired for cable TV?
Nice, large conduits allow cat-6 today, fiber tomorrow..something else later
Yeah, wireless can be useful, but a wire is always better
I'd go the opposite direction and build a monolithic dome house with few or no internal walls.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Like actually having long eaves, thick walls, real designs like a central solid brick or concrete wall for heat storage. Things that the idiot architects today seem to not do.
the new stuff will be home run all electrical to a lighting control panel from Vantage, Lutron, or Crestron (technically old tech as it's been around for 30 years)
Conduit to all low voltage locations that all home run to a set of inset wall panels for easy infrastructure upgrades. (Again old 30 year old tech)
The only new-new tech would be fiberoptic lighting from solar light collectors on the roof. The light tube skylights are horrible at insulation and are just holes in the ceiling. The fiber optic stuff does not impact the roof insulation value. Plus it is a lot easier to run.
The last thing I would love that is a new-new thing. Aero-Gel as the wall and ceiling insulation.
Everything else is easy. Home theater, a real one not the lame tv in the living room "home theater" is simply a spare room set up with only a few grand of gear. Even good 4K projectors are only $3000 now. If your house is set up for easy upgrade, the tech can slide in and be upgraded regularly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You don't need the latest and the greatest tech to have an outstanding house in US. You probably don't want to put in something that has not been thoroughly tested into a structure that is designed to serve for decades. I would recommend looking into some of the technologies involved in building passive houses (think insulation, double pane windows). And before picking on whatever the coolest fad in wiring there is, make sure you put all your wiring in pipes. This way whenever you decide you need to upgrade your GigE to Fiber, or whatever comes out next month you don't need to destroy half of your house.
A (Japanese hi-tech) hybrid Toilet-Bidet
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Because whatever idiot came up with the idea of having your toothbrush, comb, shaving gear exposed to the same air as your toilet had never heard of germs or fluid dynamics.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Literally just put the entire house inside a green house. Have the green house extend as far away from the house in all sides as I can afford.
Then manage the internal temp and humidity of the green house to create a year round micro climate for my house.
First, you have to make use of as much geo thermal energy as possible. The ground stays stable at the same temperature all year round. If you're in an area that gets cold in the winter, then what you want to do is cycle all the air in the green house through the ground. The ground stays at about 55 degrees which is well above freezing. Just using some shafts and some fans, you should be able to keep the green house at 55 degrees.
You can push it higher by storing heat collected during the day. Even in the dead of winter, a green house will get warm in the middle of the day. Often so hot that you need to vent heat in the middle of a winter day. Instead of venting, store the heat in the ground. Just pump air from the top of the green house through pipes about six feet under the ground. You'll heat up the earth under the green house which will release that heat all night. You also don't have to lose humidity if you're in a dry area if you're cycling the air that way. If you vent, then you'll equalize the humidity inside with outside. If you don't need to vent then you can keep it trapped.
After that you can play with aquaponics... get yourself a fish pond and cycle the water through a hydroponic grow bed.
Inside the house, I really liked that idea about switching to low voltage DC. It makes going off grid more affordable because you're not wasting so much power converting things to and from AC all the time. You just go DC to the batteries, then DC from the batteries into the home grid, and then from the home grid right into the appliances etc which will use DC natively. All you'll have to do is watch voltage and amperage.
Beyond that, I'd smart house the whole house with arduinos.
So... all the boring stuff like lights, power management, water management, doors, security, etc. But go farther with a sprinkler system, etc.
Then for the entertainment system, I'd go with a black screen projector for my home theater. These are neat because they work in broad daylight. No wash out of the picture despite having a huge screen or the lights on.
I'd keep the house to one story and might even sink it into the ground a bit. Keep in mind that most windows don't touch the ground in the first place. So why have the window be that far above the ground on the outside? This is relevant to the green house concept because you want the house to be in the green house but to block as little light as possible.
The roof of the house could be flat and planted or have a deck on it or something. Remember, the roof doesn't get rained on. The rain falls on the roof of the green house. It never touches the actual house.
The garage for the car should either be a separate structure or be under the house. There's no reason for a car's garage to be on the first floor. That space is too precious. Have a ramp go down into the basement and have the car kept there.
An interesting idea is to CNC mill the bricks or stones that the house is made out of. A CNC machine capable of doing this isn't that expensive and you wouldn't need to mill literally every stone. Just enough to get the effect you were going for.
A few ideas that are interesting to me are perfectly fit stones. If you look at neolithic buildings they don't use mortar. They use perfectly fit stones that fit together like a jigsaw. Gravity holds the whole thing together. You can and probably should use mortar and steel reinforcement. BUT if the stones fit together like that, you don't have to do that. They click together like legos.
Another thing you could do with that is have the entire structure carved... or milled. Imagine some sort of pictogram or pattern in the stone.
Lighting in the green house would be a big deal. You'd want the green house to be able to
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's not really new tech but a heated driveway, patio, and stairs which would be great for me since I get a lot of snow and ice.
For fixed-in-place lighting, such as sconces, pot lights in the kitchen, under counter lighting, out of doors lighting, etc. I'd figure out how to set up LED lights connected to a central electric supply. Each fixture would not generate much heat because the conversion from 110 V AC to low voltage DC would take place either outside the home or in the garage away from the living space.
Secondly, I'd put conduits in the walls, ceilings and floors, as needed, from a central location/utility closet so that cabling could easily be fished to every room. Right now the kinds of cables likely would be coax, ethernet and maybe telephone. Any changes in tech might require replacing current stuff with new tech (fiber optic) or higher quality than anything currently available. I wouldn't pay to put in cables that aren't currently needed because there might be something better in the future obsoleting what you put in. At a multi building campus where I once worked IT installed connections between buildings to a central location using fiber optics which wasn't needed. They thought they were future proofing themselves. It turned out all the fiber had to be replaced (not the conduits, thankfully) because when they finally got around to installing the switches some years later, they found the originally installed fiber was the wrong stuff. Newer fiber was somehow different.
Likewise, you might consider wiring windows, doors and motion detector locations for an alarm system, even if you don't plan on installing one. The sensors for wired alarms are quite small compared to those used for RF sensors and you will save on the cost of replacing batteries in the sensors. If later you find you need to install an alarm system it'll be an easy job.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Barring that, solar PV and an e-Golf.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
At first I would think about a pipe complex in the structure of the house so I could easily wire anything anywhere. But with the future going more and more wireless (even charging battery), it could become obsolete in a few year.
A few other idea are power outlet with USB and wireless power meter, wireless locking system, LED light bulb, smart thermostat, Solarcity's photovoltaic system with Tesla Battery, camera and security system connected to the network (and your cellphone) if your neighborhood isn't completely safe and finally a strong network paired with "Google fiber" like internet.
Elok
Make sure that they run whatever cable you decide to run (ethernet, fiber, whatever) in conduit, ideally with junction boxes on a relatively regular basis (at bends, etc), so it is easy to draw new wire through when you need to.
Yes, the electrician will say "you don't need to do that; that's silly." Ignore him. Do it.
I just recently moved into a house with ethernet run through to all of the rooms from an access point in the basement. Unfortunately over the years some of the runs have deteriorated--but sadly, the ethernet wire was simply threaded through holes in the studs, making it virtually impossible to pull new wire through. Had it been drawn through relatively large conduit, and had there been boxes on a regular basis, it would take just a few minutes to draw a new wire.
That also goes for conduits where you may want to put a big screen TV on the wall, low voltage systems (like door bells), and other runs where you may want to add something new (like in-home speakers or whatever). I know it's impossible to plan for everything, but at least you'll have a fighting chance when some new technology comes around (or something in the wall breaks), that it can be easily replaced without having to tear up a whole lot of drywall.
Cat6 network cables everywhere, running to your central cabling hub, possibly 2 per room.
Cable TV outlets liberally sprinkled around.
Speaker wires to multiple locations for your stereo with wall plugs for speakers.
They make in-wall HDMI plates to keep your wires tidy.
A couple of them newfangled wall plugs with built in USB charging ports.
A heat pump which does both heating and cooling.
Sound proofing for wherever your TV will go.
More plugs than you think you need, and a larger electrical panel than suggested to expand if you need to.
LED pot lights and lots of dimmers.
Under-cabinet lighting in your kitchen.
Basically anything which is hard to put in later. Infrastructure which is there is much more flexible down the road.
And, depending on your climate .. if you have duct work, make sure your damned seams are taped/seals so you're not losing all that heat/AC out gaps. There's nothing worse than realizing the air isn't getting where it needs to.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Floor heating/cooling/ Far more efficient than forced air and no worries about the crap your moving around your house (mold, pollen, etc.) so fewer respiratory issues. We kept our house in Korea at 17C (~63 F for the US folks) in the winter and would sweat if we wore anything other than shorts and t-shirts. You can also tie into your geothermal/solar for even further reduced costs.
Definitely solar/wind power capability-- as close to "off grid" as feasible in the desired footprint. Tie in to grid but be self sufficient when necessary.
Along the discussion of the DC home, a good inverter and maybe dedicated DC outlets. Maybe just feed outlets directly from solar/wind battery bank.
I'd add switchable glass windows to go "opaque" whenever I wanted, at least in the bedrooms.
Intercom with a console in every room, and one on the back patio/deck and garage. Less of an issue if you are building a single floor house, but quite helpful if you live with folks who are hard of hearing or you're building a reasonable large or multi-story house.
The obvious speaker, network, and coax wiring throughout.
A "dark" room with full faraday cage built into the walls. Turn it into my home theater or something. Nothing in, nothing out. Nice for private conversations and no distractions while otherwise entertaining.
Obviously some of these assume a fairly large budget. The geothermal with floor heating shouldn't be too much more to invest in initially than a "conventional" forced air system, though and will pay for itself fairly quickly. (In the central Atlantic region of the US, my calculations were about 7 years for initial install and something like 11-13 for a retro-fit). Adding solar/wind won't cost significantly less than they would as a retrofit, except possibly the grid tie-in. Do the grid tie-in either way and save yourself some trouble down the road.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
No doubt about it, at all. Design around a beautiful skeleton and your future can be as beautiful-and mutable-as you want.
When I was overseeing the construction of my new home (2001), 100 MB/s cable was all the rage (1GHz was very new, and expensive), and I installed it after the house (exterior) was sheathed, but before (interior) drywall was put in. The cable loops from outlet-box to outlet-box through the studs, with lots of slack (in a loop) between the boxes. I also put in a "pull-cord" (heavy plastic twine) from each outlet-box to both its' neighbors, so I could pull replacement cable in the future. Those cords just droop down beside the outlet box, behind the drywall; remove the box, tie on the cable...go to the next box and pull the new cable (and a new "pull cord") through. I pulled the coax-cable for TV through the same path, to the same outlet boxes.
It turns out, 100 MB/s is plenty good for my computer business at home, although making copies of backups would be faster if I upgraded to 1GHz (or higher). Since backups are made while I sleep, I don't much care how long they take.
There is a house in my area that is almost completely under ground it has an above ground entrance that looks like a big concrete igloo and a concrete slab. I bet their heating and cooling bills are almost non-existent.
1. No central thermostat, each room shall have an individual thermostat. This because the amount of equipment and sunlight impacting each room differs.
2. Some areas can have movement sensors for support light, helpful when you need to visit the facility in the middle of the night or have your hands full with stuff coming home from shopping.
3. Timer outlets for stuff like coffee maker. No need to have it going for hours making tar.
4. Outlets with CAT7 - you can POTS on them if you want, and fixed networking is still more reliable than wireless.
5. 3-phase electrical system.
6. The heating system shall be water carried, a lot less noise when having proportional valves.
7. A good basement and garage with a car lift.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
A central vacuum...
A whole house fan. The one I put in uses server fans and has motorized baffle to seal off the vent in the winter (to keep warm air from going into the attic). It uses less power than my TV and is amazingly quiet. Most of us remember the attic fans that sound like helicopters. I have a 1700sqft house and if it's cooler outside than inside, like in the summer evenings, I can cool down the whole house in about 10minutes. Just remember to open up a few windows, otherwise you could be pulling dirt in through any cracks or ash from the fireplace.
Well it's 2015 now, you should just run out and buy a Mr Fusion portable fusion generator. That way you never have to buy power from the grid again.
Build with concrete. Dig deep, to put most, or even all of your home underground. Some wise guy posted about lawns up above. I say, plant your lawn on top of your house. Heating and cooling are minimal, and there is virtually no maintenance on the structure. You're safe from tornadoes, and safe from flooding unless you build in a flood plain. A few solar panels, and there's no need to have the electric company come out to hook you up to the grid!
Oh, great thing about the concrete shell of your home. You can use lots of rebar, and put mesh everywhere. Great faraday cage thing - it will help to keep the NSA from spying inside your home.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A Kohler San Tropez Bidet.
Because I'm worth it.
http://www.us.kohler.com/us/ca...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I want:
100% RF and Thermal shielding.
Fiber LAN
Ultrabattery/Ultracapacitor energy storage fed by solar and geothermal.
LCD windows (electrically controlled opacity)
Real voice control, not set phrases.
I know most people still don't use phone lines, but I would keep phone lines in every room, with ethernet also in every room. I would do coax cable everywhere also setup so that it would be easy to either add cable tv or satellite tv in any room. I would renforce some walls, as I live in a quake zone, I would want to mount an 80" tv on a wall and not have to worry about it falling down in a big quake. I would set the house up to be wifi friendly as well. So that if someone wanted to know the optimal place to put this wifi devices they could, maybe a wifi shelf that was located high, had a place for the cable modem or dsl modem or whatever and plugs with power surge protection built in. Now to the real tech. Smart thermostat. Something that could sense when I am home, maybe the thermostat was connected to sensors in the door that knew when the door opened and close and had heat sensors for detecting living beings in the room. Thermosensors? That way when noone is home the thermostat could automatically go to a low setting or turn off. I would add in smart heat / cool routing. Sensors to know which room you were in most often and allow you the option of having those rooms kept warm or cool at the temperature you liked and then other rooms that may not be used as much kept cooler. So if you spend all day in the office and use a particular bathroom, the tv room and bedrooms would not be heated up. I would add in smart appliances in the kitchen. Autosensing range hood that could adjust speed of fan based on what was cookiing and how much steam / smoke was coming from the stove. An overn that would quickly warm up and could sense when things were taken out of the oven so that the oven was never left on by accident. If the oven was empty for 15 minutes or something adjustable then it automatically shut itself off. Smart refrigerator that could track what was in it by bar code and tell when things would expire. Option to turn it off or not use that feature. Door and window sensors that could be connected to some central system to show when any window or door was open. This could be setup to tell the heat/cooling system to turn off if someone opens a window for more than x minutes to save energy. Setup for centralized IoT. Solar built in with the possibility of wind turbine.
Only 'flamers' flame!
cat6/cat6a at minimum cat7/cat7a if available if you live there long enough you will eventually need the speed of a better cable 10gbe should last you a while
also conduits to every box and never ever use fiberglass insulation its cheap suuure but you don't really want to be scratching for the next couple months every time you have to do any work in it do you? don't have that with any other insulation type
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mesh Technology - Lets you enjoy an enclosed porch when the bugs are out.
Hardware/Software Separation - You'll get along with your spouse better if you have separate bathrooms (particularly toilets) and separate closets.
Social Media Integration - Parties revolve around the kitchen, so ideally have nice flow between the kitchen and (as applicable) the living room, porch, and dining room. In my case, I really don't want guest helping with the cooking or dishes, so give me a design that fences them off with a bar-top counter, but keep it open enough that I can peripherally participate in whatever's happening in those other rooms.
Dedicated I/O Path - Your pantry should be between your kitchen and garage/carport, so unloading is fast and easy. Also include a small desk and file cabinet for processing mail and keeping keys/wallets/purses out of site.
Security-Hardened Design - Minimize number of entrances; ensure perimeter and walks can be fully lit; install alarm system; include tornado shelter (if applicable).
Non-Paged Plan - This is VERY expensive, but you'll appreciate the absence of stairs if you spend your retirement years here.
DRY Principles - Make sure site has adequate drainage, that gutters are clog-free or otherwise easy to maintain, that bathrooms can be well-ventilated, that your roof isn't too complicated, and that you don't have a pool. Moisture is the enemy!
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
'nough sad.
I'd add some kind of DC electrical system. AC power is fine for moving electricity over long distances, powering motors, heaters, etc. However, all electronics need DC. Life without AC->DC adapters on every damn piece of electronics would be great. (Yes, maybe you'd need some external DC->DC adapters, but lots of things already can be powered by a USB port -- meaning 5 V.)
AC is especially dumb for solar: you have DC power source (a solar panel) which you then turn into AC power which gets converted back to DC for your electronics, LED lighting, etc. What a waste!
There have been some recently work on in-home DC power systems, although I haven't followed it closely (since I'm in no danger of owning a home soon).
Line your entire house with NSA-proof tinfoil.
Preserved those old sevant bell-ringers, original wires, now circuits. Had the back servant and front guest staircases. First floor entertaining, 2nd floor bed and bath, 3rd floor jids and servants. Only about 3,000 square feet.
Your new home should have a 12 VDC electrical system supplied by batteries (charged by solar panels) to run lights, fans, and anything else that does not require AC line voltage.
This will avoid the 20% losses creating AC from stored battery power, and will greatly decrease your reliance on the local electric company.
Yep. And their house will never be knocked down by a tornado or a hurricane - although flooding might cause them a problem.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
In no particular order:
1) Whole house wired for gigabit ethernet, stereo, coax, fiber, phone and hdmi
2) Well organized wiring closet (see item 1)
3) Well insulated
4) Solar array or wind turbine with battery bank
5) Cable trays/runs/oversized conduit to useful locations to make updating wiring easy
6) 5V DC USB on outlets
7) Two ovens, well designed pantry
8) Zoned temperature controls
9) Natural gas or propane powered backup generator
10) Useful out-buildings
11) Tankless water heater
12) House designed to minimize need for heating/cooling
13) Attached green house for gardening
14) Workshop with adequate power, shop air, dust collection and tools
15) Garage with extra car bays and car lift
16) Theater room with projector/huge TV and easily updated wiring and equipment closet
17) Water pipes to gardening locations if gardening outside.
18) Low maintenance yard. You do NOT need a lush green grass lawn that requires endless mowing.
We had a central vacuum when I was a kid, and we hated it. The best use for a central vacuum system is to rip out the vacuum and use all the tubes as conduit for wiring. I guess that's really very much a matter of opinion. In any case, be sure you test one out before insisting on putting one in. I would much rather spend my money on a good Dyson (though I understand some people not wanting to lug around that much weight or relocate the bulk of the noise).
You also missed it on the power in the garage. You want 50A, not 30A. You can download the recommended installation guide from Tesla for a NEMA 14-50; use that and you should be good for anything. It's always better to overspec and then not need it than to underspec and have to go fix it.
Another item to put in the garage is in-wall wires for the garage door sensors. If you're putting in a garage door opener, it requires wires from infrared sensors to the motor so that it stops closing if something is in the way. It's simple enough to put those wires in the wall if you do it first.
Speaking of garage doors, you can get some really great openers. My in-laws got some professional Lift-Master openers that are absolutely silent. That's nothing like what you get when you buy your own at Lowes Depot. (They even have some that attach directly to the torsion rod if you have that kind of door, so there's nothing overhead.)
If I were building a house today I'd seriously look at a solar install, and (when they are available) enough of the recently announced Tesla Home batteries to keep me basically power independent.
Why waste the rinse water from your shower and washer when you can use it to water your lawn?
Lots of good advice in other posts, so I won't reiterate everything.
The one thing I wish our house had was more space. We could use another linen closet. We could use a pantry for the kitchen--especially now that we do a lot of real cooking. Having higher ceilings would be a huge benefit. I would *really* like to have an extra half-car space on the side of the garage for the lawn mower and bikes.
I'm very glad there was a weird closet in the basement of our house which is now our wiring closet. I'm sure others have talked about that, though.
Think about what it will sell for and how much you want to throw away. It is your house so it's worth paying something for comfort but just remember most of those cool toys have little or no resale value when you go to sell it. And remember the cost is usually greater than the estimate by a wide margin. Were it me again and yes I've been there, I'd sacrifice instead for things people want, like extra bathrooms and storage. If money's no object, well then let us know how it goes.
If you're using a forced air HVAC system in a larger house, baffles are a must. It's great to have the ability to zone off your house. Run speaker cable to the ceilings in any room you'd ever possibly listen to music in. Take pictures of the drops. Add speakers as needed.
I like the concept of floor heating, even possibly electricity based - it seems it would fit well with strong insulation and minimal use of heating.
Air flow is a big issue. the house (or one story flat!) should have good airflow.That's one of the bigger issue with crappy small housing, or any housing for that matter. Stale air makes feel like shit.
A room should even be dedicated to washing clothes and shit like sheets, blankets, towels. just room to have them dry out, and dry out conveniently and timely. wow!
I don't care much if the house has to use brick walls, or concrete, or compressed hay and old tires etc. and passive, solar blah blah as long as it's thick enough for cheap enough. Matching the 100 to 300 year old houses in your area might be good though I have no idea what it costs.
So, heat flow and air flow are a must but don't leave out the flow of sound waves!
Room sizes, shapes and materials ought to be mathematically optimized for sound quality and isolation. That's a huge and permanent upgrade for whatever speakers you're using and that's one of the things that will be still there 100 years down the road and can't be replaced.
I should be able to host illegal rogue concerts in the main room (even if not having that many or that big other rooms)
"You look like you're trying to drop a steamer! Would you like me to help?"
Embed tubing in floors to support radiant heating from whatever source (solar, earth-source heat pump, basement fusion reactor...).
Conduit/guides in every wall to allow for easy installation later of whatever wiring/small diameter pipes might be wanted.
Structure built with security in mind... strong frames around exterior doors and windows, exterior doors that open outwards, upper windows not easily reachable from the ground, ground floor/basement windows with some structure (bars, or very narrow openings, perhaps), consider best locations for security cameras.
Metallic layer in exterior walls to thwart through-wall imaging devices.
Even if every room is heated/cooled without forced air, you'll still want a good ventilation system. Homes without that get stuffy.
Make sure that everything is up to code today and have water/waste/electric installed and ready to go everywhere. That way you don't have to comply with some future local ordinance regarding new wiring and do a lot of overhauling. Same goes for fire sprinklers, make sure they're done or at least ready to be done in all spaces regardless of occupation. You never know when you want to renovate that attic or garage into a room and then the city comes a-knocking on your door for an inspection and you have to re-do things.
The rest is simple, have conduits everywhere you can think of for electric, low voltage, water and heat, at least one per room. If you ever want to have a new bathroom or add a toilet in the next 20 years, make sure your existing piping is sufficient (use a 3/4" supply to the space instead of tapping a 1/2" pipe in the basement).
I would also use hot water circulation-type radiator heat instead of forced air, it's a lot cheaper, make sure they have valves too that can bypass so you can heat only specific spaces. Make sure your basement doors are wide enough to allow for that newfangled heater to get through as well as your furniture. Nothing worse than seeing your contractor skimped on the doors and installed the minimum width ones when your couches can't get in.
Don't skimp on the financial stuff, make sure you have title insurance and homeowners insurance etc. You may have to spend 20-30k extra on the build and paperwork but if you can't afford that, you can't afford the house.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I have a house that was wired by a geek when it was built 20 years ago. At the time, CAT-3 and CAT-5 were state-of-the art, so the house is wired great for those. Central control cabinet in a closet where all the wires come together, it's great. The problem is, that cabling is old enough to be worthless now, and because of the way it was installed, there's no way to use the old cables to pull new cabling through the walls without opening the walls up.
You won't know what kind of cabling (if any) you'll want to add onto the house in another 5-10 years, so my advice is whatever you decide to put in the walls, use conduit. Your future self will thank you once CAT-6 is old news but there's a new power/data/display/who-knows standard that you'd like to wire in.
Not all new tech is as good as it sounds - what I would do and why:
1. Hot water - forget the instant gas fired tankless - why? You have no hot water if power is out. Also, they are poor if you need a volume of water. A high efficiency tank is great. Add to that a hot water circulating loop - you can't do this with a tankless system. Adding the loop with a tank system gives you hot water in one second instead of waiting for all the cooled water between tank and faucet to be expelled. Add a timer-circulating pump, and you are not circulating hot water at night when you don't need it. All old tech that works better then new tech. If you want to go tankless, then spend the money to put one near each cluster of bathrooms, or you will waste water waiting on hot water.
2. Natural gas heat - if you live in a colder climate. Heat pumps just pump out luke warm air. But if you can go dual fuel, and use a heat pump sometimes and natural gas others, you have best of both world.As others mentioned, radiant heat is a great choice, but you then have to install forced air for AC.
3. Some kind of air-exchanger that uses the exhaust air to pre-condition the incoming air - i have not found anything for residential I like in this area. But, if you have a tight house, and you have various exhaust fans or central vacuum, then you should have a way to supply fresh air.
4. Bath fans - I like fantech brand - the motors are remote mounted, and they are super quiet
5. Central Vac - I can't live without it, but I have a pile of dogs and cats and no carpet. Check out something "newer" called "Hide-a-hose" - i have not tried it yet, but plan to in next house. No more hose to store and get out. It stores in the pipes in the wall.
6. Shower Pan and walls - check out Kerdi - I will never do a bathroom without it again.
7. Quad electric receptacles at the night stands in bedrooms and kitchen counters.
8. Cat X (whatever is the Ethernet standard at the time)
9. Network rack and patch panel - I have it in the basement - all home runs of Cat 5e and coax to this location.
10. AC outlet in closet/pantry - you want your wireless router in the center of the house - why not in a closet. Also, you never know where you may want to plug in a flashlight or something.
But I've put a lot of thought into this, myself. On the other hand, I've got an appointment in a few minutes, so this is going to be somewhat disjointed.
Environmentally friendly heating and cooling. This will depend on your location, to some extent, but includes Geothermal for heating and hot water, subterranean air conditioning, solar water heat, evaporative cooling, self-tinting windows, and adaptive exterior walls to adjust for light and temperature conditions. Also an insulated thermal mass that can be used to store waste heat in the day and be extracted at night.
Exterior:
An asymmetric roof, tilted towards the south (in the norther hemisphere). Lots of solar panels; connected to the aforementioned thermal mass to capture excess heat. If you live in an appropriate part of the world, add non-directional wind turbines on the northern edge of the roof. Under the solar panels, copper or stainless steel roofing tiles.
Gutters designed to feed into an underground storage pool for grey water. Use the (cleaned) grey water for your heat exchange.
Interior: .Wired ethernet in every room, with a switch panel near the circuit panel. Coax pulled to every room. (Well, the maybe not bathrooms for the last 2).
Doors and interior walls designed so sections of the house can be made environmentally independent, with environmental controls that are at least that specific. Interior ductwork for HVAC. All wiring done via conduit with regularly placed, pre-placed pull strings. Every room on its own electric circuit (if not more frequently). Extra-deep outlet boxes, so adding future tech will be easier. Outlets every 6-8 feet. USB power outlets in every room.
Wallboard and paint that doesn't significantly interfere with radio frequencies. (Fuck you, Horsehair plaster).
Doors and passageways that all meet ADA standards. At least 2 entrances to the ground floor that do not have stairs or significant thresholds. Extra closets placed on every floor such that they could be converted into an elevator should there be need. (that is, one on top of another).
All plumbing done at least 8" from an exterior wall and inside an insulated, interior wall or bulkhead (fuck you, burst pipes).
Mixed height work surfaces in the kitchen. Main-floor or bedroom-floor washer and drier. Open floorplans. Exterior door in/very near the kitchen. Composter near the kitchen's exterior door. a yard that is wheelchair/stroller accessible. Raised growing beds near the kitchen for vegetables.
There's certainly more, but I got to run to the doctors.
#1 (hands down) - Ballisticrete -- I'd put it on the outside of any new home I may build. Ever since we've gone to stucco or other lighter, cheaper, more energy conserving materials, we've gone away from physical projectile protection that mud/adobe, logs, and brick used to provide. Ballisticrete solves that problem. 1" stops small arms fire, and 2" stops just about everything short of a 50 cal.
#2 - Solar lighting for rooms with no windows -- I have a Solatube in a 2nd bathroom, and it is great for savings and ambiance.
#3 - Solar attic fans running like a server tower -- With water lines in newer homes going in the attic in AZ (vs. copper in the ground), the tap gets DAMN hot in the summer - leading to a lot of wasted water from the tap. Solar attic fans that kick on above a certain temp and can be disabled in cooler seasons (to preserve the heat), and run like old computer towers (pulling in cool and pushing out hot), would save that water - and cut your cooling costs.
#4 - Fiber + Cat6/7 to every room. (I already have a central networking box for all networking and cable - an absolute must - but I only put in Cat5E.)
Less fancy "tech" that is just as important:
#5 - More internal storage/pantry space in the right places - A big, internal, temp-controlled food storage area (vs. out in the hot garage) is a must. And why would I need a 4th or 5th bedroom that's just going to become an unorganized collection spot for junk?
#6 - Longer garage for more utility; If possible, a 3rd car garage spot.
#7 - Grow more usable trees (fruit vs. ornamental trees for looks). Cut down on grass significantly.
I hadn't considered the tax side of it, but I dislike retrofitting houses, so I'd rather get it out of the way up front. Also, we're playing in fantasy land with imaginary money, so I'm not really thinking about up front costs, and more about how convenient this stuff makes my life over the long term.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
I go home to relax and unwind, and would like to have is a nice old-school, multi-room analog audio setup. Nothing digital. The other thing would be a good antenna for running a HAM radio. Maybe I'm getting too old, but I find myself caring less and less about being online.
1 Conduit lots of it all back to a utilities room. Fill with cat 6 or better today. Your going to want one end point per wall in a room plus some ceiling/wall mounts for Wifi.
2 Home automation, zwave has gotten cheap but pick your poison of standards. While I do not find colors that useful being able to have different temp whites is gear mid winter etc. Remember that LED are flexible in placement indirect lighting is often much more pleasant. If your just looking to prep the main stumbling block tends to be small electrical work boxes and lack of a common through the box.
3 Insulation if you have the cash closed cell foam along with an air to air heat exchanger.
4 Heating, geothermal it's power use is electric so ties well with solar. Radiant floor is the nicest.
5 Hot Water, geothermal ng/propane backup
6 Power, pretty much put up as big a solar array as you can get on the roof, Couple this with a propane/ng gen set. Propane is the only thing you can store locally for an extended period. When they stop buying power back and retail rates plan space for a battery.
7 Kitchen ng/propane except for the oven.
8 Cooling, geothermal. Make sure that the system can de/humidify the house without heating/cooling it.
9 Electrical, AFCI's are generally code use them wherever possible. Insure that as much as feasible is home run back to the panel. Install more than the code minimum outlets. For example my desk area was run with 4 30a 110v feeds, It was trivial to replace one of them with a 240v 30a and I watched my heaviest power consumption are drop 5% so less heat to cool etc etc.
10 CCTV pretty much just more cat 6 going to enough points so you get 360 coverage with overlap. Some people like camera's in their home I'm not a fan.
No sir I dont like it.
> 15 years ago your recommendations would have been things like CAT5e drops in multiple spots in every room
Last year I did something similar to that. Why wouldn't you? The drops are separate from the hosted technology.
Coax, Ethernet, power, ducting, double pane glass in vinyl frames, electronic outer door locks, cameras, inset LED ceiling lights, tankless water heater (if you live in temperate parts of the US and need the space), solar panels depending on a number of concerns that affect cost-benefit.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
We built a two story farm home several years ago and I 'tried' to plan ahead. Hard with tech, but I tried.
The center closet is a wiring closet. Switches, Access points, wiring points, etc. The top half if hardware, the bottom half is standard closet. All items are fanless and there are louvers on the door for air cooling. Heat has never been an issue.
I pre-wired the house with multiple RG-6 cables for our satellite tv (We live away from town) with multiple outlets in the rooms
I wired the house with CAT 6 cables
(I wish I could have done fiber back then)
Outlets in the room alternate circuit breakers. If a breaker trips, only half of the outlets lose power.
Built in several wire paths for surround sound setup. If the furniture is rearranged, the speakers can move and there are no cables running along the floor or walls
There are speaker lines run through the house, the 'main' stereo system can provide entertainment to several rooms
The walls have several wiring boxes on them, but it is SO WORTH IT.
We do have a small home 'windmill' for power generation. It is pre wired to the well pump for water in a power outage, the refrigerator and our four freezers (home grown beef, pork, goat, chicken, turkey, lamb plus halibut and salmon from fishing) and frozen veggies can be connected when needed. We have a "clean" burning wood stove for heat and cooking. Outside lighting around the house and paths around the barn are solar powered low voltage lighting runs
Good Luck
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
I am a massive fan of flipping the bird to my local power company. Thus I would make huge sacrifices to go completely off grid. I have fewer and fewer devices that demand 110 or 220 so having 110 plugs all over the house is something I could live without. I am fairly certain that nearly every device that I have could happily have either 12v or 5v supplied and run just fine. There could be one common corridor in the house that provided 110 for those things that demanded it.
But in my ideal universe the fewer utilities that I could have the better. If there was a way to get around gas and water then I would be wildly happy.
I just have zero interest in giving a chunk of my money to a bunch of shareholders and overpaid executives ever month.
The biggest complaint I've had about my homes is that they weren't built in a forward looking fashion.
All of the wiring was designed and installed in a fashion which requires the house to be gutted to upgrade it to code.
Some of the materials used were designed to be replaced or fail (eg. cheap orangeberg sewage utility plumbing), with difficulty in replacing.
No foresight was given to the durability of the structure (eg. having to replace the roof every couple years due to hail) in terms of costly maintenance and time.
So for my list:
* The structure would be a large monolithic dome, for durability.
* The entire structure would be built with 'false walls' between the living space and the exterior wall(s) to allow for easy access to eg. power runs.
* There would be a raised floor, to allow for easy access to...
* Heating, which would be run in a similar fashion as electric, eg. under the floor water heat, provided by eg. pex tubing.
* Since the structure is basically a large faraday cage, fibre would be run to an external structure to allow for outdoor wireless technology expansion.
* Solar would naturally be integrated, with the wiring put in place to allow for future expansion if necessary (both in the utility room via additional capacity on the fuse box, but also at wherever the power is generated). If Google can leave a large amount of their fibre dark to await capacity, I don't see why I can't do this with copper.
* Several additional sub-juncture fuse boxes would be placed throughout the house - one for the kitchen, one for the garage, one for the basement. Just something small. No point in having a purely single-star power topography.
* Solar concentrators windows/lights on the roof would assist by providing light to the house while at the same time powering solar.
* The house would undoubtedly leverage geothermal for power (hopefully) and heating/cooling, as heat exchangers are quite efficient and monolythic domes have notably low energy cost.
* Large windows (where appropriate) would have the newer panes which automatically dim the environment and/or can be used for projection purposes.
* Power outlets would be placed every 5 feet along walls and counters.
For security, I would likely install something like UniFi (ubiquiti) based cameras. I'm a fan of their power control systems as well, so those would also be used for lighting and such. I'd probably also consider using x10, simply because it offers a bit more flexibility and no lock-in.
But then, replacing eg. in-wall power outlets is fairly straightforward.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's kansas so tornado is the most likely and as far as flooding it is at the top of a hill well above any flood plains. I have seriously considered not underground but a house built into a hill but I wasn't sure about erosion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
So I could have an Xgrid cluster of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
cat 7a in every room
faraday cage in every room.
biometric door locks in every room
Solar panels with hydrogen energy storage (split water during the way, combine at night for energy).
Underground storage for cars
Intruder detection system
Unlocked honeypot rear entrance for intruders
Intruder elimination system (gun turrets, tasers and gas)
building super structure to withstand bombs
Underground base via elevator
Secure wet lab
Manufacturing setup via 3d printers
Underground secret submarine bay
Backup fusion reactor for power
If you are building your own, design the roof specifically for solar panels - i.e. a large flat south facing surface. A good solar installer will help you determine the optimal mounting angle for your location. Design for it. Many existing solar installations have an unfortunate "tack-on" feel since the roofs where never designed for mounting solar panels.
One thing that's on my list for if/when I ever have a custom house built (in addition to all the other good ideas here) is decide where my TV/Stereo/etc. is going to be, and have shelves for all the equipment with easy access to the rear of them via a closet, or a door in a hallway.
One of both in each room. Without them, it's not a home.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
NFC sensor already implanted in my hand with set of keys to open certain restricted door, garage and other things.
Building with my own two hands, swinging a hammer at every nail. I have had to fight with the bank over construction details because my methods are so out of the ordinary for our area. I ended up having to get the state fire marshal to agree to come inspect my home himself before the bank would release my construction funds.
... just a little off = house of crap.
The "new tech" I'm using isn't new at all. It is 'new' in that it is just now starting to mature as a technology, it is new to North America after being ignored for years or decades, or is just now becoming cost effective for the residential market.
Advanced Framing - this is what the local inspectors and bank had a problem with, despite the fact that everything I did was to code (even pictured in detail in the code itself exactly as I had built it) and was published as a best practice in publications put out by the local electrical coop. Especially cool if you can afford to do it is the Larsen truss wall.
Passivehaus quality windows from the likes of Marvin and Alpen - triple pane windows filled with noble gasses to reduce or eliminate convective coupling, films to minimize IR losses or gains, frames that isolate the surfaces on the inside of the house from those on the outside of the house with insulating materials so there is no direct path for heat.
Residential fire suppression - There are now fire suppression sprinkler heads available designed to operate at the lower pressures of residential systems and are suitable to handle potable water. I've brought utility pressure water into the house, run it through a sprinkler in every room, and then to a pressure reducer for distribution to the house. My household supply runs by all the sprinklers first; this way there is no stagnate water in the lines possibly compromising the integrity of the heads and I know that as long as all is well with the water in the house then I have a functioning fire sprinkler system ready to spring into action. The cost was very low - a couple benjamins - for the heads, extra water pipe, and fittings, and was well worth the extra piece of mind.
Affordable foams for insulation - I couldn't afford to go fully foam, but I used affordable XPS and polyiso panels to supplement the batt insulation I used. Foam seals the walls to minimize energy movement through the envelope.
LED lighting and electronic ballast fluorescent with super long life bulbs for low operation costs and high ROI.
Mini-split heat pump units for super high efficiency cooling. I'm cooling my entire house with less power than my wife's hair dryer uses. Granted, it's only 800sq ft, but pretty good even so.
Radiant floor heat using intelligent automatic variable circulation pumps and tankless water heating units. This keeps efficiencies as close to theoretical limits as possible and increases occupant comfort to minimize use and mis-use of the heating system. Provisions have also been made to incorporate alternative heat sources at a later time such as solar collectors or gasifier.
But the most unconventional thing I did was that I DO NOT COMPROMISE on standards and I sweat the DETAILS when everybody else just wants to shrug and say "good enough" or "that's not how we've always done it". A house is a big pile of little things and if each of the little things is "good enough" what you get is just a little off + just a little off + just a little off + just a little off +
... tied to the front door so you can open it upstairs.
I'd make it a Monolithic Dome
In the "server closet" in my house, I used a built-in 16" fan for circulation. The fan was a re-purposed low voltage fan solar attic fan that I selected because of its low noise and power efficiency (less than 5 watts.)
However, for the last 10 years, computer manufacturers have been on an efficiency binge. Although the servers and equipment in the closet used to consume many hundreds of watts and produce a lot of heat, they now do the same tasks with very little waste heat and power requirements.
Or in other words, don't bother with the fan. I don't even turn mine on anymore.
Don't bother sheetrocking the interior, just mount bezel less lcd panels on all the wall. Then you can project anything you want on it.
Like what Tesla worked on. Imagine how much money you could save since you don't have to install wiring ;)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'll second the 'no hallways' and 'eliminate unnecessary rooms' principle. My house is only 800sq ft, but 400 sq ft is a combination kitchen/living room/foyer and the other 400sq ft are doors off of that main room - two bedrooms, bathroom, mechanical room/pantry/laundry. Everyone is scandalized by how small it is...until they visit. Then they all say, 'Wow, this is plenty of room.' They all leave wishing their house wasn't so big. All of them. Every. Single. One.
I built a house a few years ago and searched Ask Slashdot for Ideas. Here is what I did:
* Two bundles of banana cable to every room back to a central location. Each bundle contained 2 x Cat5e + 2x RG6QS
* One bundle of banana cable over the jacuzzi tub for a small TV.
* Run an ethernet jack behind appliances. (fridge, stove, washer / dryer, and water heater)
* Electrical outlets in the eves of the house. Christmas lights are a breeze to put up and take down
* In the great room behind where I was mounting the TV I also ran in-wall rated HDMI 1.4a back to the central closet.
* I picked a room that in the future would be a media/theater room and ran power + HDMI to the ceiling and speaker wires in the walls.
* I never called $phone_company to install lines. The only lines to the street are power, water, and cable (for internet)
The last one has caused some problems as every service provider says your house is unserviceable since it is not listed in "the database".
You did not specify where you were building the home - North with heating concerns or South with cooling concerns.
In the North I have found one of the best heating methods that is very comfortable and economical is radiant in floor heating with PEX tubing in concrete floors so you get a nice thermal battery and very good heating characteristics.
In the south some of the posts on ground loop heat pumps are very good advice.
Lots of insulation in either case. Radiant barrier in the roof. Living roofs can be very beneficial as well.
Metal roofs can be very long lived, but can be very noisy during storms.
Maintenance free exteriors are also a godsend.
The comment on the higher basement ceilings is also very good, I wish it was an option when I did mine.
Conduit to at least 2 places in each room is also good to a central wiring / electrical room.
Conduit between basement and attic also is something I wish I had done as we added spotlights out back and security cameras, would have made it much easier.
Home automation systems are a nice to have, control-4 seems to be a very good high end system with good support.
Lots of closet space, more than you think you need, bedrooms, bathrooms, attic floors, etc. people tend to collect tons of stuff.
Over sized garage - wider than the cars you tend to put in and deeper - lawn mower, bikes, patio furniture in the winter, kids stuff, and on and on.
The indoor wall sound proofing is also a great idea - we did a little for the master bedroom and bath, but not enough.
sig, what sig, am I supposed to have a sig? I don't want a sig. I don't need a sig.
It sounds ludicrously domestic, but I visited a co-worker's house once where they had central vacuum and it was cooler than shit. Little air outlets peppered around the house (on the stairs! Brilliant!) you plug a headed hose into and vacuum away. Filter in the basement gets cleaned out monthly.
If I had such a thing in my house, I'd live a much cleaner existence.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
You simply need Proteus. Just be careful as it will attempt to breed with females of child-bearing age.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
In 1972, when my parents built the house I grew up in, they put in an intercom system. At the time, I'm sure it was an "oooh, wow" gadget. We hardly ever used it, and today there's one terminal remaining in the house which, by today's standards, is incredibly dated-looking and ugly. On top of that, it probably lasted longer than the electronics produced these days. The lesson I take from that is to keep it simple, design for potential additions/upgrades if needed (the "add conduits" advice given multiple times in this thread) and make sure anything you do add can be easily replaced, upgraded or removed so that it's not an eyesore in 20 years. Things like in-floor heating sound like a great idea reading some of the other posts here, but I wonder: what will happen when that system fails down the road? Rip up the entire floor to fix it or replace it? (I'd actually like an answer to this if anyone knows.)
I'd put that "gadget" money into the better energy efficiency ideas which have been mentioned in other comments here -- especially simple design features that will continue to pay off throughout the life of the house with little or no maintenance. One simple non-tech suggestion I'd like to add: consider adding internal doors so that unused parts of the house can be closed off and left at a cooler (or warmer) temperature than the parts of the house you actually spend time in. For example, many houses have a ground floor where everything is open and the kitchen, family room, living room and dining room are all connected. If you live somewhere with cold winters, it doesn't make sense to be heating up the living room and dining room if you're spending all your time in the family room. With a closed door separating them you could shut off the heating vents in the unused room(s) and save on heating costs. This also helps limit noise travel when company is over. (Note that if you live somewhere with genuinely cold winters, you might not want to do this with rooms that have water pipes, as they could freeze and burst.)
www.gaiageek.com
Most important thing for me is running wires for Ethernet and cable. WiFi is obviously your secondary access point, but make sure every corner of the house has a wired connection.
You should also look at running dedicated power circuits to your home theater, office, etc. Anything with a concentration of expensive electronics should have their own circuit. When I built my office, I had two separate branches - one for electronics and one for lights and light duty outlets. All my important circuits use 12ga wire with 20amp outlets. Even if I am not drawing the current to justify them, I feel they provide cleaner power.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Looking out over the next couple of years, 802.11ac at 2.4/5 GHz would be the wireless standard that you need to install - any electronics you buy in that time are going to want that. Infrastructure needs for this are pretty well understood. After that, you'd want to be able to install 802.11ad - infrastructure to that is a bit more difficult. To support it, you'll need 1 or 2 wireless routers per room with a good viewing angle. This, to me, would say that I'd like power and wired network ports in the upper corner of every room. When I built an addition onto my house 10 years ago, the contractor thought I was crazy wanting a power outlet and network tap in the upper corner of each bedroom closet - but it's been an excellent place to locate 5 GHz routers. Adding future nanny cams, microphones for voice control of the house, etc becomes easy with such well located network access points.
Assume that the data provider entries to your house (phone company, cable company, satellite service, TV antenna) need to be provided by you. Run power to the locations, install a good ground rod at each location, run conduit from the locations to your wiring closet. If you hate everyone nailing their own ugly demarc box to your exterior wall, design an acceptable utility entrance that will hide them.
I think Cat 6 and quad-shield RG-6 to one or two wallplates in every room makes sense. For the foreseeable future, broadcast TV (either cable or satellite) is going to get distributed around your house on Coax, not Ethernet, and short of going to Fiber, Cat-6 is about as good as network wiring is going to get. It's also hard to imagine network speeds really needing to be above the 10 Gbit level that you can get with Cat-6. How many 4K video streams do you really expect to ever need on a single port? I don't know that I'd spend the extra money to run conduit to every room - perhaps only to the one or two main media centers of the house. You know that you'll kick yourself if you decide to open up a datacenter in your spare bedroom and need to install multiple single-mode fibers to the rack of raspberry-pi sized servers you install in there, but we can't have everything.
Wire all the doors and windows in the house with alarm wiring, even if you don't plan on installing a system. Make it hidden - magnetic switches embedded in the frames with magnets mortised into the door or window. Run two to every door/window, so a broken wire isn't a critical failure. If you're into christmas lights, prewire outlets under the eaves so you don't end up with extension cords all over the place. It's a good place to install a network jack also, in case you decide to install security lights/cameras.
You didn't ask about environmental design, but I agree with a lot of the posters - spend some time to minimize heating and cooling costs and maximize comfort. Recognize that most HVAC duct design is intended for minimum installed cost, not necessarily minimum 10-year operational cost or comfort. Consider humidity control - for me in Phoenix, it means humidifiers in the initial plan; for someone in Florida, it might mean dehumidifiers in the initial plan. Consider allergen control - a lot easier to implement if it's considered up front. Consider a zoned system with possibly multiple thermostats - in a big house, being able to completely turn off HVAC to unused rooms (rather than shutting the door) can have significant savings.
Consider asking the plumber and electrician to go outside their "install it as cheaply as possible" mindset, and make the systems more user-friendly. As an example, it might cost a few hundred dollars more to wire the house rationally (each circuit breaker controlling outlets in the same room) rather than lowest cost (minimize wire length, even if it means a circuit breaker controls a few outlets in three different rooms, or a single room has three different breakers so you never know which one to throw to turn off power to a specific outlet). It might cost a few hundred dollars more to plumb the house rationally - a
And the worms ate into his brain.
Your first principle should be aiming for low maintenance costs. Minimize the cost of *owning* the house, in terms of *money*, *time*, and *complexity*. It makes a huge difference--much easier to hold onto the house over time if your finances change, for example; much easier to have time to spend with people or on new productive projects rather than doing the same old maintenance; less to remember or coordinate between multiple maintenance people; more return if you ever want to live somewhere else and decide to hang on to this and rent; etc...
Don't install gutters. People put off cleaning gutters and then get water damage or clogging of pipes to drywells. Install french drains under the edges of the roof where the water will drain.
If your municipality lets you, install a septic instead of connecting to city sewer. No sewer fee. (Just get it pumped every few years).
Unless you play in a yard or want on for social reasons or safety reasons (depending on neighborhood), steer clear of having one. They require maintenance and generate pollution. Pick some trees and maybe bushes you like and put them in. Trimming every 1-10 years is easier than cutting the lawn every 3 weeks. I would probably tend to go with evergreens, but there's a bunch you can do. Several people have suggested gardens, and that can also be fun, but there can be a lot of labor so don't count on always being able to do it, or else pick plants that require little labor to produce (like squash).
Install a good security system. Where by "good" I mostly mean "thorough enough that it covers everything." Since you're building, a wired one is relatively easy to install.
Include low-temperature sensors to warn you if the house is going to freeze, and leak detection around the water tanks. These can be wired into the security system (ideal) or on their own.
Include low-voltage wiring for speakers as well as the alarm system.
Overpower it. It's a new house; I would set it up with 400 amp service so you hopefully never need to upgrade the electric. The cost difference between 200 and 400 when you're putting it in is usually relatively small. Also at least a generator interlock; whether you want a permanent generator likely depends on your location.
It's kansas... ...it is at the top of a hill
Now I know you are lying.
Time to offend someone
I've seen this approach advocated a few times and while I'm sure it works great in the southwest, it's worth pointing out that this simply does not work in hot-humid environments such as you'll find in much of the southeast.
The problem is twofold: one, you don't see the massive temperature reduction at night. Two, if you don't have the A/C removing humidity from the house then you're going to see rust and you're going to be uncomfortably sweating a lot of the time.
A house that is not built to have windows towards the south (with an appropriately long roof overhang to prevent overheating during the summer) will be dark and unpleasant. A really passive and lifelong upgrade is to plan carefully for the sun's path! Scroll to the bottom of this article for a cool example of how lit a house can be with no electricity!
My parents bought a house at the top of a hill with the lower story mostly underground, and because the do-it-yourself builder didn't plan drainage properly still had water issues with heavy rain until reworking some things (which isn't easy after building). You need to be very careful with drainage.
One thing that's impossible to change later: roof angle. I REALLY want solar, but I'll never get it, because my roof angle is exactly wrong for good solar coverage.
My ridgeline runs at a very bad angle for solar panels; although back of the house is more or less pointed south, it's just far enough off that getting good panel orientation requires large angled brackets, which decreases panel coverage by about half. I could probably double the energy fraction if I could turn the house by 30 deg.
Similarly, cutting some large trees down would help. But that screws with passive cooling. Tradeoffs...
The next house I build will definitely have orientation as a leading consideration for energy independence. It will absolutely affect my choice of location/lot, partly because decent curb appeal is important for resale value, and big solar panels on the street-facing roof are a turnoff for many buyers.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Of course you're right - I meant whole-house fan. Everyone in my neck of the woods uses the terms interchangeably and confusingly.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I built my house in 1969. We found a location at the end of a dead-end road to avoid traffic, well up a hill to avoid flooding, but below the top of the hill and protected by trees to avoid high winds. In construction we did three innovative things:
When I remodeled in 2000 I added:
Since then I have added:
Perhaps in the summer of 2017 it will be cost-effective to add a solar roof.
Residential heliostats. We have two. Natural light is awesome.
.
Multisplit air heat pumps. After adding insulation and reducing air leaks, the new
heating system as 4 zones. We can heat the whole place on the coldest day
with about 48 kilowatts of heat, which is less than the flue loss on our old
propane furnace.
Attic trapdoor tent, to reduce one source of air leaks. I feel like camping any
time I have to unzip and enter the attic.
Serious gutters. I really wish we had aluminum instead of the rusty steel, but
more importantly for us are the hardcore micromesh guards that finally, finally,
finally will keep out the needles.
I'm also loving the new 10 year battery only smoke detectors. Anything that cuts
down maintenance is a win.
Some of the best new home technology is actually old technology:
- Masonry Heaters, were invented in the Neolithic Era. Unlike wood stoves or fireplaces they burn clean with almost 100% efficiency and require infrequent fueling, only once or twice a day. They also look cool, have a neat ambiance and fuel costs are far lower than any alternative.
- Nickel-Iron Edison batteries were invented over 100 years ago by Waldemar Jungner in 1899 and developed by Thomas Edison in 1901. The nickel iron batteries in Jay Leno's 1909 Baker Electric Coupe are as good as new. Unlike any other home electric backup storage technology they last for basically an infinite number of charge/discharge cycles and have many other desirable characteristics such as immunity to 100% depletion (which destroys lithium and lead-acid batteries) and the are environmentally friendly, non-toxic and 100% recyclable. The only downside is their mass, but unless you will be driving your house around, it's by far the best option. And unlike aluminum batteries, and the Tesla Powerwall, the Nickel Iron batteries are available today.
- Used shipping containers: Build your house out of them. Invented, depending on your point of reference, some time between 1933 (first containerized shipping in Europe) and 1968 (ISO standard published). It's environmentally friendly and your house will be impervious to tornadoes and earthquakes. Container homes have gone from being kind of trailer-park to high-design.
Of course I would want modern options such as photovoltaics and a ground-source heat pump, in addition to the old stuff. So my advice: You will do best to select the best of both the old and new, instead of exclusively one or the other.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Apparently you have never been to Kansas the eastern quarter of the state has the flint hills, Kansas City, the state capitol, state colleges, and the majority of the population, the other 3 quarters is flat, sparsely populated, and the most boring drive you will ever take just like in the movies.
Heh, I just came here to post how you shouldn't add too much space :)
My experience with closets is that you will fill them with things. Stuff you have but don't really need. If you won't fill it, then your SO will. We live on 1022 square foot, with one child and one woman and in my opinion, that's enough.
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It would be ideal if every house on my block resisted NSA spying and illegal FBI wiretapping.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's a common practice in the area I live and I have heard both really good stuff and horror stories about erosion and poor landscaping causing water damage. I have a regular house on a hill and am needing a retaining wall because the neighbor recently changed their landscaping and now my garage floods.
Whatever you do make sure it runs systemd....
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
One thing I like about my house is that it has a large unfinished basement. Not only does it give me a lot of room to do messy projects, but it's very easy to run ethernet to anywhere it's needed on the first floor. I do wish I could get some kind of wired network onto the second floor, though.
In my opinion, avoid installing lots of "tech" in your walls. My house is loaded with so much obsolete wire: An old intercom system, coaxial, old electric heating wires, an old split-lead from before there was cable TV. Conduits are good, and unfinished space where you can access the ends.
No, I will not work for your startup
Terminate half the wires to one jack and half to the other.
You shouldn't even need to do that. I set up a simple patch panel of female ethernet connectors in my wiring closet, each connected to the female ethernet connectors all over the house. My POTS line comes into that wiring closet (well, my DSL line does, and my box has an RJ11 POTS connector). Plug the phone's RJ11 into the RJ45 where you want the telephone (yes, male RJ11 plugs into female RJ45 by design), find a male-male RJ11 to connect the corresponding patch panel RJ45 to the RJ11 POTS line, and bingo you can have your POTS telephone wherever you thought to place an ethernet outlet.
You probably want to avoid messing up connections between ethernet and POTS though. I've done it without ill effects, but no one phoned me during the time it was misplugged.
Now that I've wasted the mod point I awarded here before posting, some other tips, not all cool new tech:
- some place with ethernet that you can have a noisy server. Servers aren't that noisy any more, but I've had to junk one supposedly silent server because the power unit emitted a very annoying high-pitched whine, and cheap hard disks still make noise. This could be the wiring closet, but not necessarily.
- there's a (maybe European) quality of cable called "grade 3" that is better than cat6 (cat6e?) in that you can wire a satellite (coax) signal directly to it.
- if you use contractors, watch them. Every day. Get them used to the idea that they can ask you things. I put double RJ45 outlets in a lot of places, but the only place I really wanted two was where I was putting the television. Guess where the cabling guy decided on his own to only put a single because the patch panel had one hole less than needed?
- if you use contractors, watch them even more than that. I have a friend who used to change out of business work clothes into worker's coveralls in order to walk around his future house every evening. One evening he sees something bad (ISTR isolation) and calls it to the attention of the guy working nearby. The reply was "Oh yeah I know I messed up but it's too much work to correct, it'll be covered by drywall, the owner will never know".
- why not run cable to the fridge? To somewhere you might want a (PoE) surveillance camera? Wifi repeater?
- battery-powered doorbells suck.
- easily accessible storage space for things like vacuum cleaner, mop, dry food, clothes
- BTW, central vacuum cleaning, but storage is good anyway.
- I put washing and drying machines on the bedroom floor instead of basement or kitchen. No more carrying dirty clothing up and down stairs, but YMMV if your sleep patterns might clash with the noise. BTW, drying machines are better and cheaper if they have a hole to the outside.
- depending on your local weather, DFV (double-flow ventilation) with heat exchange so you don't lose heat, and cheaper electricity and heating mentioned by others
- Kitchen: granite desktop. Draw-out trash can just underneath so you can just sweep peelings from the working area directly into the trash can. Dishwasher a foot or two above the usual level so you don't have to bend (you put your hand in the dishwasher a lot more often than in the oven, and kids can fall on the upwards-pointing knives in a dishwasher just like they can burn their hands on an oven). Power plugs for kitchen appliances of course, maybe ethernet?
- going to have animals? Where are you putting their food, will you shut up the dog during the night and if so where, do you need a cat door, etc.
Lots more of course, I have often heard that that the house you get perfect is the third one you build!
Electro-chromatic windows, so a push of a button (or automatic based on incoming light levels) would darken or turn windows into privacy mode. They are even working on a combination of PV-EC windows, such that the window would also act as a solar cell, powering the window itself without the need for running any wires.
Conduit. The future might be wireless, but the wireless you'll have to use won't be able to penetrate a window, much less a wall. Conduit will allow you to pull cheap cat5e today, and replace it with fiber 10-20 years from now when you finally NEED it.
Run conduit to every room where you think you might someday want to have a network connection, or need to put a line-of-sight access point. Don't forget the bathrooms, garage, basement, and snack bar in the kitchen.
From at least one box in each room where you're terminating the low-voltage conduit, run another conduit up to somewhere on the ceiling about a foot or two from the wall. You can omit the boxes and just leave the conduit there (photographed and documented for future reference), but they'll make your life INFINITELY easier if you someday need to put an access point on the ceiling). Remember what I said earlier about wireless? When the day comes that you'll need it, you'll be glad you have a ready-to-use conduit that just needs you to cut a hole in the ceiling and grope around until you find the conduit. For line-of-sight wireless, you'll be glad you have the ceiling location.
If possible, run two conduits to non-adjacent walls in the bedrooms and living room. Don't forget the area under the wall cabinets in the kitchen and the snack bar.
Big tip: don't terminate the homerun from the wiring closet to the living room in a box behind your likely TV location. Put the box near a corner, in a spot likely to be easily accessible, then run another conduit from THERE to the box behind the TV. That way, if you someday have a 700 pound entertainment center blocking easy access to the box behind the TV and you bought some new toy that needs to have wiring pulled, you can temporarily pull it to the accessible box and play with it for a few days without having to deal with large-scale furniture movement.
spend all the money you would spend on a gshp well on thicker insulation, better windows, and intelligent shading. Its more cost effective and won't break. gshps are a lazy and expensive approach to heating and cooling. Use your capital to eliminate the loads in the first place. Then use a significantly cheaper and smaller ashp if necessary. Even in climates with 8000 to 9000 HDD, properly air sealed R30 walls (inc glazing) will drop your design heat load to 1 ton or less of heat pump. ground sinks are ridiculous at that low size.
+1 on the quarter turn valves. My old house is well-designed in that every last little thing has a separate shut-off valve. The problem is, I don't think there's a single valve in the house that actually works, even after replacing the soft components in some of them. Whenever I need to work on the water, it's never pleasant.
Another thing I'll mention: Being tech minded, when my ancient water heater finally died, I replaced it with a whiz bang electronic energy saving model with a "lifetime" warranty. The water heater really did save me energy, but the electronics were sensitive. My first replacement motherboard for the water heater was free, and when it died again less than a year later, I discovered the catch in the "lifetime" warranty was that it only covered one free replacement per individual component. I had gotten my free motherboard, and would have to pay $150 for another. Considering their failure rate and replacement cost, I yanked that thing after just two years, and replaced it with a low tech analog version that costs more to operate, but works flawlessly.
(Of course if you live where you can get natural gas without paying $50,000 for the hook-up, gas is probably the better way to go for a water heater anyway.)
On the other side of the consumer purchase spectrum, the money I invested in good toilets really paid off with tangible water savings, and a track record of solid reliability.
Yeah, I hear you. But there's some charm in older houses, and some value that can be wrought from bringing a 'fixer' into a new age while repurposing some of the quirks into features (like the milk delivery door from 50s houses).
But even with a new house, you probably need some plan for maintenance and upgrades over the 30 years it'll take you to pay off the mortgage. I got suckered into reading about the current sorry state of home automation systems a few weekends ago simply because I had to decide which smoke detector to buy... There are no less than 6 big competing standards with big industry backers at the moment! All I wanted was to make sure I could (eventually) get a little notification on my phone if the smoke detector goes off, but that meant wading through that mess and trying to choose a "winnar" now.
Anyway, I went with the FirstAlert detectors, since they could eventually link up to the Lutron Smartbridge hub that talks the ClearConnect protocol. By all accounts, it's the least fully-featured hub, really just talks to lights and window shades, oh, and the smoke detectors. And yet it appears to be the most responsive and reliable.
Microsoft is behind the Insteon line of stuff, that talks through your electrical system like the old X-10 devices.
Zigbee is already dead
Z-wave appears to be what everyone else uses. But all of the products seem to be featureful but unreliable. Hopefully that will improve someday.
Apple has its own thing, but I stopped reading there.
And Google has Nest and stuff, which seems interesting, but maybe not hackable enough for me.
Plus a bunch of open source stuff, a lot of which uses the Raspberry Pi, which I find intriguing. But I don't want to spend too much time rolling my own either.
While I was still with my ex-wife her father was building a small observatory in his back yard. Just big enough for him, a desk for a computer, and his 8" or 10" telescope. He lived in the suburbs so he had to get a filter for the type of street lighting the city used. Too bad I never got to see it because I broke up with my ex before it was done but it was fun planning how to build it with him.
Conduit runs to every room, with multiple walls in the TV/Entertainment rooms.
Conduit runs to an patch panel (fiber & ethernet) in a secureable area in basement with airflow, power, equipment rack.
more power outlets in Kitchen & TV/Ent room
A charging shelf with power outlet (kitchen/bedroom/?) depend on your family
A cleanout y fitting for the sewer, give the rotorooter snake a straight shot to the sewer line.
A pet litter box spot, a pet exit, & a pet sleeping spot ( pet bath spot for the fanatic)
Make your house mantainable & safe.
Luxury where you will use it and not too fancy to use or clean !
I have more, but I gotta go.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
Why even have a powered dryer? Just amazes me how people are really sold on the things. Uses a lot of energy to speed up clothes drying, as if those who can afford a dryer can't afford enough clothes to give the wash time to dry on a rack. It's less wear and tear on clothes to hang them to dry, rather than tumble them some more. Now, some people complain that the clothes aren't all nice and soft and fluffy when dried that way. The powered dryer alone can't get the clothes soft either, have to use fabric softener. A lot of those fabric softener sheets use dangerous chemicals, such as phthalates. And there are fabric softeners that are meant to be added to the washer rather than the dryer.
I'd like to see a closet especially made for hanging wet clothes up to dry as well as clothes storage. I thought perhaps this closet could run the length of the house so that the ends could be opened to the outdoors to create a breezeway. Use screens of course, to keep bugs out. Put it on one side of the house, the side next to all the bedrooms. It would be a labor saver too. Instead of moving clothes from washing machine to dryer and then to storage, this system would have the user moving clothes just once, from washer to storage. Could put the laundry room at one end of the closet, or right in the middle. Since the closet is on an exterior wall, could make the entire outside wall open to outdoor air, for faster drying.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
A beer volcano and fine strippers?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If in a city, I'd make sure conduit was in all the walls, to account for any pipes or wires of the future. designed in a way to always be able to get at them. maybe wainscoting. That's really all for tech in the city, whatever makes sense and is affordable at the time I suppose.
If in the country (more likely for me) I want a monolith dome (a brand of concrete dome created by filling a bladder with air, then adding basalt rebar and spray on concrete in multiple layers. I'd bury said dome deep into the side of a hill, with the top open with a patio and large skylight. windows all around the unburried parts. Same deal as the city dwelling with the wainscoting, prepare for change.
This hobbit hole would be designed for comfort, and I'd hire a permaculture specialist to landscape the area with a variety of complementary plants in layers to create a food forest. Integrating solar panels, a water still/desalinator, and a geodesic greenhouse and workshop or two into the landscaping as well.
From the outside you would not be able to tell there was a 2000 foot radius three story specious dome built into the hill. It would look far smaller and more humble. ALL wiring and plumbing designed for easy access and upgrading just in case the standards change.
I want this building to be able to last a thousand years. Hopefully, with me alive in it. Meh, depends on whether we get a few medical breakthroughs before I get too old.
But that's just the fancy of an old nerd who's vision of technology is a little different.
External surveillance.
Solar PV, battery storage, fueled generator backup.
Fiber and CAT6+ in every room. Decent wiring panel. Switches installed. Whole house firewall. WiFi APs in the best spots right up front.
LED lighting, Occupancy sensing controls. RGB LEDs and color control, with inputs for environmental sensing and adaptation.
Whole house interior and backyard/patio sound system with both wired and wireless controls.
Electric locks on all exterior doors, PIN pads and secure web control.
Garage door opener with secure web-based control, and monitoring.
I know, it's cute when someone says 'secure this or that'. There is no security. Let's include a home security system and server with robust and replicated logging. At least I can reasonably know I was hacked, trespassed, and violated. Maybe. Add in some intelligent monitoring and notification to the police, me, and the wife at least.I don't need the optional Facebook/Twitter posting module, though it would be fun to post the intruder's face in real time.
Oh, and alarms on external components like the A/C unit, pool equipment, people steal the darnedest stuff.
In Arizona, solar assist hot water.
For a pool, the obvious variable speed pump etc. More surveillance.
For the patio (Arizona, remember) a full outdoor kitchen, which is not really technology, but too important.
And built-in safes, for valuables and separate ones for firearms, one in the bedroom and one elsewhere. Fingerprint tech of course.
Ho tech and Lo tech FTW.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Cat 6 cable, lots of Cat 6 cable.
I would do something that modern constructors have forgotten to do: have all your big windows (or, at minimum, master bedroom) on the side of the house that faces the equator. This means in the winter you get sunlight as heating, and in the summer you get less direct sunlight, meaning a cooler house.
The house I live in currently, built a scant twenty years ago, has the MBR windows facing west, which means crazy AC costs in the summer (Texas!) just to get the MBR under 80 degrees F when it's time to go to sleep. It's unbearable, but boy was the house cheap.
Oh, would that Texas weren't so humid, I'd be doing this, too. But nothing like waking up to a raincloud in your house in August in Texas! The front doors in Houston sweat.
Apparently you have never been to Kansas the eastern quarter of the state has the flint hills, Kansas City, the state capitol, state colleges, and the majority of the population, the other 3 quarters is flat, sparsely populated, and the most boring drive you will ever take just like in the movies.
Try west Texas... Just sayin'
(And yes, I've driven both, but you said "most boring" so there you go.)
Run a Cat 6 cable into every bedroom, office, and living room. Nothing beats GigE, not even close, despite of several years of "gigabit Wireless AC" and the new "gigabit powerline" tech, the truth is that under a typical real life scenario those give you at best maybe twice the speed of 100Mbpbs Ethernet.
You fucking FOSS nuts will go to extremes to avoid having to install Windows. ;)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
What if I do not panic because I have an alarm and I own guns - and I live in a no-crime area. I know that last part sounds crazy but it is basically true. There may be a drunk driver or speeder on the road but I am a half mile from the road, in an unincorporated town, and have exactly six houses within maybe 20 miles of my property. There *could* be crime here but, realistically, the closest you are going to come to crime here is, well, me.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Have a large diamater garden hose attchment near a main water shutoff valve for everything else. That way if your washer is on fire and burns its supply hose, you can have enough water pressure in a garden hose.
If you live in an area where fires are common, metal sprinklers on the outside of the house.
Have the smoke alarms trip the power (except to the lights). There are modules that fit in the electrical box that will trip the circuit breakers next to them that can be wired to most A/C powered linkable smoke detectors. The trick is to get fire detectors that work in the laundry and kitchen that won't activate due to humidity.
Consider a storm shelter that is appropriate for the region. i.e. something that can't flood and isn't a trap if the house falls on it.
We had a house built a few years ago, and in hindsight the biggest thing I would have done differently are the power lines. A standard A/C PowerLine is 15 amp, which isn't much when an average laserprinter can easily pull around 9 all by itself. Two pc's and a laptop on the same circuit = tripped breaker when the laserprinter kicks in.
In hindsight, each wall in our office room should have been on its own dedicated circuit, just to deal with the incidental spikes in power draw.
Another thing would be to keep a close eye on the work performed by the contractor that pulls the cables - even though we had a pre-install walk through on what kind of cabling to put where, we realized long after the fact that some of them had been skipped during installation, including cable & ethernet drops in the large hallway closet where I intended to put the cable modem and WiFi router down the road.
Last but not least: don't skimp on actual wiring, the price difference between a high-grade cat-6 and blue light special cat-5 is insignificant, but can save a lot of headaches for years to come.
Also, depending on where you live, consider landscaping options. It's a lot easier to do things right the first time, rather than try to move things around later. Depending on where you live, it can save much troubles to go with some drought resistant / low maintenance options.
I mean a recirculating water run, a slightly inclined track of water in glass channel running along the walls... that begins at the highest elevation of the house and leads through every room of the house as it descends, passing through small openings next to doorways or the corners where walls meet. The channel should be wide enough to accommodate the passage of a small rubber duck.
In the middle of wall spaces you might have a small channel or hole to allow a bit of water to divert into various wall-mounted contrivances such as tiny waterwheels, various resonant metallic or glass surfaces that resonate when dripped upon, where it's overflow passes via tube to a lower elevation of the main channel in another room, or a drain channel, if you can spare the loss of water volume. The water movement may itself contribute a comfortable background noise, but you may be able to amplify it by placing shapes along the bottom of the main channel that introduce turbulence.
At the terminus directly below the origin, a vertical bucket lift would ensure that the rubber duck and other floating items are always headed somewhere. Due to the large surface area of this concept and difficulty to clean you might have to keep the water mostly sterile with a bit of disinfectant to discourage algal growth in the water. keeping it slightly acidic to elevate surface tension for best drip sounds.
Thus if you're wiring your house for water, you might also commit to a separate plant system that delivers wholesome plant-water to each room, with a touch of hydroponic nutrients and a overflow drain ffor recirculation. Then pots or vine anchors or window trellis can be served by a watering system run for a couple minutes a day, each plant container tapped to receive a sufficient amount of watering.
Or if you like cats, just substitute cats for the water. WARNING: Your heart may explode.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I didn't see anyone talking about home Automation. There are some decent options for automating lights and other things such as irrigation control, door locks and thermostat control. Lighting control is fun to play with, and you can set up a server or web appliance to control it though a web page. One thing that i'd like to have working is a camera on the front door so I can use a tablet to look and see if I want to bother answering the door.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Make sure you install cable runs of Appletalk cable. In case Apple ever becomes 'cool' again so you can have all your Macs share the laser printer.
So I can heat my home with cardboard waste and tree trimmings from my yard.
The kind he's talking about is part of a refrigerator. And if you want a refrigerator, I can highly recommend the LG LFXS30766S - it is kind of insanely expensive (though timing your purchase can help with that), but it's also the only appliance that was specified in the contract when I sold that house. It's a lot nicer than the Sub-Zero I have now. The door-in-door feature is surprisingly useful (get drinks out of the fridge without opening the whole thing). About the only downside was that the ice storage capacity is limited, but there's an ice tray in the freezer - so let it make a full bin, empty that into the freezer, and repeat once or twice, and you'll have enough extra to handle guests, small parties, etc.
I have fallen in love with using a bidet toilet seat. I feel unclean now if I just wipe with paper. It just connects to the water line. It is cold, but cleansing. However, warm water would be nicer. Some electric models can even air dry.
Conduit-cabling
Insulation, double or triple paned glass unless you live somewhere it's 65-80 degrees year round
Photovoltaic panels and solar hot water heater
LED strip lighting
Induction stovetop
Ground-source heat pump for heating and cooling
Vent the refridgerator to outside if you live somewhere hot
240V power in the garage
Power outlets in garage should be wired so the top outlet connects to a different breaker than the bottom outlet, so you can use high-power devices in both at once
Skylights
Heated floors in bathrooms (and maybe living areas)
Grey water system to direct wastewater from everywhere except your toilets to your yard
Septic system you'd need emptied every decade or so for your toilets
Rainwater collection tank
Fruit trees in the yard instead of purely decorative trees
Dual-flush toilets
Instant hot water tap in kitchen
And I really shouldn't have to say this but for crying out loud, if you're going to put a toilet in a separate room, include a sink so you can wash your hands before touching everything!
Smart glass (electrochromic) windows.
I would say west Texas is about the last place you would want to have car trouble.
Last time I was in Texas I was going to six flags it was in the 80s and it was mid-july I think it was hot even for Texas that year and the tar on the roads was melted and sticky it ruined a pair of shoes and took forever to get off the car.
Downvoted? *LOL*
Apparently you have no idea just how much technology goes into automating hydroponics if you have an unlimited budget. :D
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I was going for a funny, and yes I have been to Kansas and have family who live there, but when most people hear Kansas they think the western 3/4th.
Time to offend someone
I was driving to Denver once and I choose to go late at night to avoid the heat and any traffic. I ended up almost running out of gas in western kansas because although there were towns here and there none of them had gas stations open after 10PM.
If money weren't a factor (which is never the case) the list of things I would add would be long, but a few items would definitely be convenient. Like everyone has one side of their house that faces to the West, and in the evening the sun shines through those windows annoyingly bright. Sure there are blinds and curtains, which do the job of blocking it, but I'd much rather have the LCD glass that goes from clear all the way to a limo tint with just a tiny electrical current (like a AA would last a year). I'd also definitely have everything wired for remote operation, so door locks, lights, and power outlets at a minimum. The HVAC would have motorized and controlled duct flow control to allow for the temperature control in each room to control the temperature in that room to whatever you want. I saw a really cool system on "This New House" where they used the swimming pool, and underground huge tank, and the house itself in this system that used thermodynamics to heat the house and pool in the winter and burn off heat for A/C in the summer and was basically completely self-sustaining with the whole system being powered by solar panels. Very cool. Oh the list of gadgets and innovative goodies is always so much longer and larger than my budget and savings... if I had any savings.
This is a small suggestion, Aside from obvious cat6 wiring (which I did), the thing I wish my house had, was AC power going to the door bell. What my doorbell actually had was some Low Voltage wires that went through the whole house to a giant transformer mounted in a hallway, with some more low voltage wires going from there to an old AC adapter in the garage. This is a pretty common setup for wired doorbells.
What I would rather have is a regular AC access point near the doorbell. Then you can have a doorbell/camera/intercom system. A few of these already exist, but I expect them to get better.
For now I am trying to find the most painless way to get power to my doorbell, because I don't want to be running a camera/wifi off a battery.
master bedroom as a panic room
carjackings
My solution is to not drive in my bedroom.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
.
Plumbing / main wiring via a 'utility corridor' to make maintenance easy.
Solar power with emergency generator, NiFe battery.
Both vapor barrier and air block membranes throughout, 2x the recommended insulation as well.
Prefer Monolithic Dome (monolithic.com) built to be FEMA near tornado proof (wrong term, but ultra hardy in all kinds of weather and storms).
Rainwater catchment system with option for potable water use from it.
Concrete (properly sealed) or wood hard floors.
Cool using indirect evaporative air conditioning or mini-split if refrigeration is the only way.
4 car garage/shop with heat and air separate from living space (but nice covered walk between. (half of area is 'shop')
Easy to mow with 'robot mowers' (design for it, not back into it).
Ceiling fans (we love them) throughout. Prefer similar to BigAss Fan Haiku series.
LED lighting throughout. Projection video to inside of dome surface!
Lots of outside light, directly or with solar tubes like Solatube in prescribed areas.
Home control system that is understandable and works without much 'input' from users (btw Haiku fans now do some of this themselves!)
Energy efficient appliances & windows.
Parking/driveway with permeable concrete or pavers. Allows water to soak in if not collected. Permeable concrete can also collect water if put over impermeable area.
Yes, I dream of a lot. Even more if I think about it. Most is doable. But I am starting to get of the age it isn't going to get done. ... Oh well.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I would like a doorbell that shocks the hell out of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and pretty much anyone that weighs more than 100 lbs.
Total off-grid capabilities; Solar, Wind, Battery Backup, Diesel backup. Automated home audio/video Water purification/softening technology In-house fiber with as much wireless capabilities as possible including wireless video Automated lighting with full LED technology and upgradable to next gen lighting I would build the home out of steel and not wood. I would put several sub-levels if I could. Sound proofing technology wherever I could.
In thinking about a new home, I would look at industry and how wiring and water runs are done. See if you can have a wiring closet.
If a new technology arrives that requires fibre, or requires 12 volt distribution, I would certainly plan that new wiring could be done without having to break ceilings, or walls, other than at outlets.
And I would have a 200amp 220v entrance, (which is what I have in my home), and with today's technology, protection devices for lightning caused voltage surges and the like. I would get a few 1k watt UPS's and some car batteries and build a backup system in case of power loss that could cause freezer or fridge content loss. And I would look at a dual internet system one of which has vpn only access to a second system, Reserve this system for automation. You should be able to vpn from the www to check on the internal system.
And I would not overdo the spending. You still want to be able to live and to enjoy stress free living.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Several people have commented on going passive thermal, good insulation, etc, and really, these are the things that you will value long-term (as well as, by the sounds of the type of person you are, the "hackability" - which is where the often-reiterated conduit comments come in, as that really is your best option - well, any easily-accessible cable run system; I suggested false ceilings further up as another alternative).
If going concrete slab foundation (probable nowadays), put a layer of expanded polystyrene under it. This thermally isolates the house from the ground, and means you can do things like passive solar, using that concrete block as your heat storage.
Of course, if you care about the environment, you are better off minimising soil disturbance, so instead of cut-and-fill as is common now, build around the existing landforms and use piling instead of a concrete slab (a piled house has the advantage that it's potentially more flood-resistant, and it gives you a crawl space that will be very useful for running cables in future).
Some of the suggestions are very region-specific; do you need to worry about pipes freezing? Is it dry or wet where you live? How much is heat or cold going to be an issue? Snow? Tornadoes? Rain? Drought? How much does the local climate affect your design decisions? (e.g. Southern California is going to be quite different to Seattle, which will be quite different to Florida - and these are assuming, like others here, that you are in the USA; something like Norway or Fiji or Egypt would be very different again). Design for the local conditions (e.g. don't make a grass lawn if you live in a desert - that's just dumb, and irresponsible). Local building codes, water take laws, height restrictions, material availability, etc matter a lot, as do things like whether your specific plot of land has covenants on it.
Build responsibly: have a think about the ecological and economic impacts of what you are doing. Look at life-cycle analyses for everything, and if you can, try to get the best score on whatever local "green star" certification system is available (not only will this mean you have a more energy-efficient home, you also minimise environmental impact, and usually - somewhat counter-intuitively - your build cost as well). Recycled materials are great (shipping containers, crushed glass and waste paint in concrete - also can look amazing when polished - recycled wood, recycled aggregate/crushed concrete). Depending on where you are, you might have to do some work to find local suppliers and contractors who will work with (or know how to work with) such things, but it is worth it.
As long as it's not a desert, make use of your stormwater. At the very least, go for a low-impact build (green roof - added insulation as well - or raingardens, or any number of other neat solutions), or simply run it to a tank and use it for grey water (watering the garden, flushing toilets) - or even as your primary water source. A water tank above ground level is harder to build, but means it doesn't need a pump (be creative).
If you are going really crazy with your tech ideas, consider crawlspaces. You probably don't need these in every wall (though the fun you could have with secret passageways should not be understated!), but even just under the house or in the ceiling would make accessing conduits etc easier (also, think about the roof structural design, and whether or not you can actually negotiate it without needing to be a contortionist or a midget). A totally bonkers but awesome idea would be a full-height tunnel that runs under the structure as a "backbone" for all your services - if you're feeling really crazy, this could even go to the property boundary, making service relocations a breeze - and, even the option to check the mailbox in the rain! (I once got a tour of a large auditorium that had one of these running under the carpark, and it was pretty awesome - would be especially so if you have kids). You won't need to care about the
1) A "whole house" fan. They are very nice if you're not super-sensitive to temperature (i.e., gotta have the AC on all the time); it's like an instant breeze from each window and can even cool the house down before turning on the pricey AC.
2) A fireplace insert that houses small fans itself. This also can save on the bills if you're in a woodsy area with much dead wood/branches.
3) I bought empty property and may put a custom house on it some day. My dream (which is not for everyone) is to wire it with 120 VAC AND a 12-volt DC bus to every room.
I think everyone is getting wrong, which is why solar hasn't taken off. Expensive inverters? Rows of costly batteries taking room in the basement? Hugely expensive solar panels? And major labor costs to put it all in?
I think the bigger home motors need to remain 120 VAC (refrigerators, etc.). Whereas many of our modern devices (televisions, etc.) could be run directly off of 12 VDC.
My plan would be this: Devise a standard, DC port (with circuit breaker) for each room. Throw a couple of $100 car batteries in the basement hooked to a DC breaker panel with the battery's own AC-adapter trickle power supply. Add $200 solar panels to the roof, etc., one-at-a-time, whenever I have the cash/mood, and connect each to the DC bus (with appropriate diodes everywhere). Add an external, weather-proof DC port too so that the family car can possibly connected for charging the car's dead battery, or, in reverse, partially running the house after a long power outage. (I experimented and found I could keep food chilled indefinitely during an outage by filling pots with ice from the local store, and stuffing the pots into the refrigerator. Just like they did over a century ago!)
Now here's part where being an electronics designer is required: Each electronic device would need to be internally modified so it accepts the 12 VDC. I know this is a dream for most people, but I look forward to a day (should I Kickstart it?) where such small devices accept 120 VAC OR 12 VDC. Then, the would be plug and play. Until the, I'll just have to mod my stuff myself (have already done in the past) or use those cheapo cigarette light inverters for automobiles.
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I live in a condo. It was built in the 1970s, with the kind of high quality building where right angles weren't really a requirement, just kind of a suggestion, cement subfloor needed to be smooth enough to cover with carpet, not actually good enough to replace with wood later, redwoods and other trees were planted too near the buildings so we're having root problems, etc. Even though some of the folks have been here since the beginning (and it's only a 32-unit complex), nobody's got a bloody clue where lots of the wiring and plumbing is. We know where a few parts of it are, but how the plumbing or electricity gets between the upstairs and downstairs units is mostly a mystery, and when the cable company wanted to replace the old analog system with digital, they just ran new cables on the outside of the building and made holes because they couldn't figure out what was going on inside (so I've got some really convenient cable jacks that aren't on the new system.)
But yeah, conduit is the way to future-proof any communication technology that does need wires. Also, heating/cooling ducts can be really useful (both for themselves, and for adding in wire later if you didn't have conduit.) I currently live in a part of California that has lots of buildings with electric heat (lowest upfront cost to the builder, and my annual heat costs are higher than when I lived somewhere with actual winter), and we don't really know how the 220V line gets from the thermostat to the heater, and don't want to rip out the ceiling and walls to trace it. (Before that I lived in a house with steam radiators, which I liked, but there wasn't a way to put in central A/C.)
Putting in more sockets along the walls than your current electrical code calls for is usually a win, as is home-running them all to the electrical box if you can. I needed more power upstairs, and we had to rip out a bunch of bathroom wall and ceiling to run the cables from the circuit breaker box. Also, you should put in a circuit breaker box that's big enough to add a bunch of random things later, instead of one that just barely has room for the initial wiring.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm in a 32-unit condo. Yes, we've got an HOA, but it's just us. We've occasionally hired management companies to do stuff for us, but only when it made sense. And yeah, we've occasionally gotten into arguments, like the current one about what trees need to be cut down (the cheapskate builder who built the place in the 70s did things like planting redwoods and some fast-growing trees right next to the building, so we're having problems with roots and roofs that stay wet all the time, but they are nice for shade. And we do occasionally have people who get grumpy about the monthly fees, but the accountant is one of the residents, you can see all the numbers, and possibly we need to be putting even more into some of the maintenance funds than we do.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No joke, you gave one option, had to make it a good one.
I know, not new tech, but sorely missed from most US homes. Even new construction can be done with office supplies and there are so many cracks and gaps right from the start that it is not even funny.
To reduce cooling and heating expense as well as reduce environmental impact, I would insist on Geothermal Heat Pumps.
I built my house in 1993 in the south of the Netherlands, and the rainpipes from the two largest roofs feed into a sieve, and then into a 10 m^3 concrete underground tank. That has (one-way) overflow into the sewage, and one-way suppletion from the water network if the water level is too low. I use that water to flush 2 toilets, for washing laundry (needs less soap as there is no calcium in the water), and watering the garden if needed. So you need dual water piping system, one for drinking, kitchen and shower, and one for the rainwater. It also needs a controller and waterpump to suck up and pressurize the rainwater.
On the flat roof of my garden shed I have a green roof, with plants. It keeps the shed cool, stores rainwater against sewage system overload, and looks nice from your bedroom window.