One of the areas that requires a lot of design work is wiring: the electrical system and other wiring such as phone, cable, and data connections. It is important to get this right before the walls are sealed up because it is difficult to modify later. It is the system that has the most end-points, will have the greatest effect on day-to-day life, has more flexibility now than it ever will, and has had the least design or input so far.
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| Outlets near floor in living room. One for data, one for electrical. |
Outlets
The electrical system includes the lighting, electrical outlets, and switches. We’ll cover lighting separately — it involves a lot more than just wiring.
The electrician spaced the electrical outlets about equally around the walls. Other than a few specific requests, we trusted his judgement and code for the exact placement. On the main floor, our builder had the electrician turn the outlets horizontally and place them close to the floor for a cleaner look. Upstairs in the more functional rooms, outlets are at a standard height and orientation for better accessibility. In a few locations where we know we will have desks or counters, the outlets are just above or below desk height to provide easy access for equipment.
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| Main breaker panel (rather full) |
Other wiring
The rest of the non-lighting electrical wiring is for appliances. Nearly everything in our house is electric, including the HVAC system, water heater, sump pump, dryer, oven, and now the cooktop. We pre-wired for an electric car charger in the garage — this was the biggest cable, up to 100 amps. The oven/microwave combo and cooktop require 50 amps each, the dryer, water heater, and sump pump each use 30 amps, and each of the two exterior heat pump units use 15 amps. This adds up to a large potential load on our electric capacity. Most of these items won’t run at full load most of the time, and many will run rarely. A demand-weighted load calculation showed that we should be fine with the standard 200 amp service common in new construction.
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| Kitchen outlet with phone (blue), ethernet (grey), and twine for pulling cable through the conduit. |
Communications
The area we had the most input on was the communications wiring. We believe cable and phone connections are becoming obsolete, so we only added a few. We have one phone connection in the master dressing room and one in the kitchen (where we’re planning a communications center). We added one cable connection in the living room and one in the media room. These should cover most important use cases.
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| Main ethernet panel with conduit |
Our dominant communication technology is digital data streams. This was where we focused most of our attention (and money). Wireless LAN is nice for quick access from anywhere, but it is not as reliable or as fast as ethernet. We have a wired access point in each major area. WLAN or long cables allow access near that endpoint. We specified cat6 cable so it will be usable for as long as possible. Upstairs, we have an endpoint in each of the secondary bedrooms, one in the master dressing room, and one in the laundry/craft room. On the main level, we have one in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the office, and one in the garage. The closet in the media room will be the center for both media equipment, and our computer connections and servers. All of the ethernet runs from the upper two levels end at a panel in the media closet.
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| Living room with conduit for future cabling |
Even cat6 ethernet cable will eventually be replaced by something better. To provide future flexibility, conduits run from the media/server closet to locations throughout the house. This is tubing in the walls with a string run through it. In the future, we will be able to pull the latest cable (such as fiber optics) through that tube, allowing us to provide hard-wired access to the main locations in the house.
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| Crawlspace with several conduit endpoints |
Conduit is harder to run and costs more than ethernet cabling, so we limited ourselves to three conduits per level. The upper level has one for each second bedroom, and one in the master dressing room. The main level has one in the kitchen, one in the living room, and one in the office. To make it easier to pull a cable through, the conduits go roughly straight down and end in the crawlspace; one larger conduit connects the crawlspace to the server closet.
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| Projector mount with conduit and electrical |
We have a short conduit within the media room that runs from the media closet up to the middle of the ceiling, where we have a mount point for a projector. This allows us to run a video cable such as HDMI directly from the source equipment up to the projector in a convenient and concealed manner.
Sound
Wireless speakers are good enough for ambient music, so we limited our speaker wiring to the media room.
Two subwoofer coax cables run from the media closet to opposite corners of the room for flexible subwoofer placement. Speaker wiring is run from the media closet out to eight locations in the room: three in the front, three in the back, and two on the sides. Not all of them will be used right away, but we wanted to support whatever future formats might specify. The side speaker wires aren’t even ended at an outlet; there is just some extra cable in the wall which could be used in the future. The rear connections end at the floor so that they can be run up a speaker stand. Extra cable was left in the wall higher up to support wall- or ceiling-mounted speakers.
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| Rear speaker wiring with outlets near the floor and extra cable above |
Security/automation
The final wiring is low voltage wiring for a security system. It also enables the much more interesting possibility of home automation. Door sensors and motion sensors can be triggered for security or automatically turn on lights when someone enters a particular area. Wiring for a security panel can be used to install a touchscreen for central control. Some extra wall switch boxes were installed to support programmed control of lights at several main locations within the house. All the wiring for these systems was run downstairs into the server closet. At our discretion, we can install a panel that connects everything up and provides security, automation, or both.