Residential Structured Cabling Question?

Shanda RBucy

My house is in the midst of extensive kitchen and bathroom remodeling and now has about 50% of all the plasterboard removed. Why don't US remodeling workers cover their dirty shoes when walking on my expensive carpeting? A cultural thing?

So while crying about my carpets, I say to myself, "self, what a great time to put in structured cabling!"

My house is about 2000 sq/ft with an half basement/garage and upstairs living area with 3 bedrooms, 3 baths.

I'm thinking to run to absolutely every room: 1 cat6, 1 dual RG6, and 1 3e telephone cable.

Yes, I know that I could buy all this in one cable, but don't want to do it this way. Are there any other cables I should be running along with the aforementioned, so that my house can some day be the "smart house of the future"?

I'm thinking to put the connector box downstairs in the basement somewhere because it would be convenient to access, and no room upstairs where it could be elegantly installed. Good idea? Anything else?
Update : It surprises me that Americans almost always wear their outdoor shoes into the house. Then they let their infants crawl all over the floor, oblivious to the presence of germs and viruses.

I asked the workers nicely not to wear their outdoor shoes on my clean carpeting but was ignored.
Update 2: How about sound/stereo cables?
Should I run those seperately?

Dennis Gardner

We Americans wear shoes and use Wi=Fi. Thats just our culture. Smart homes have cabling, smarter homes use wireless.

F1nut

I find it insulting when someone asks me to remove my shoes in their house. I don't want your germs on my feet.

On3s&Z3r0s

Dennis Gardner wrote: »

We Americans wear shoes and use Wi=Fi. Thats just our culture. Smart homes have cabling, smarter homes use wireless.

Not all Americans wear their shoes indoors. Last I checked, Hawaii was in America, and no self-respecting braddah would ever let you in his hale with your filthy street shoes on. That's like putting carpeting around your toilet... just nasty!

Also, I hate wires, they are the bane of my existence, but long runs of Cat 6 in your walls are the best thing you could ever possibly do for moving media around your house. You could spend hundreds of dollars on dual band wireless routers and beat on those damn things for days trying to configure / optimize them and still get maybe half the reliable bandwidth I can count on with zero effort with Cat 6 and an unmanaged gigabit switch.

My wife and I have been passively house shopping and walked into one house, built by and for sale by the owner. They had coax to every room, but no Ethernet, not even RJ11 jacks! I asked the owner about it and he said, "Oh yeah, we only have the one phone jack in the kitchen because it's required by code. We just figured everyone uses a Comcast modem and wifi." So there are definitely crazies out there who think that kind of thing.

But to answer the OP's question... structured cabling is awesome. I did two Cat6 and two RG6 to every room in the house except bathrooms and doubled that in the rec room on different walls. Honestly, it's totally overbuilt, but the cabling did come bundled that way and I got a deal on it. The dual Cat 6 is only fully utilized in my rec room and office. In a couple rooms, one Cat 6 is being used to carry data and the other is wired to a POTS distribution panel for phone. (If there's a case to be made for wireless technology, it's wireless landline handsets, for as long as landline continues to be a thing.) I'm not using the extra run of RG6 anywhere. Unless there's a strong possibility you're doing both cable and satellite, I wouldn't do with the extra coax.

Most of the new construction I have seen is going with one RG6, an RJ45 jack (one would hope with Cat6 behind it) and one RJ11 jack. I'd run Cat6 to both and just terminate one with an RJ11, you never know when that second run of Cat6 might come in handy. If you really want to do it right, put some nice orange plastic conduit on any runs that are going to areas like your media room, so if the technology changes you can use the old wire to pull new wire.

And I did run in-wall 14guage speaker cable for surround speakers completely separate from any low-voltage communications cable. If you know the layout (or can narrow down to a few possibilities) that's another thing that is way, way easier to do while the walls are open. I wouldn't personally put wires in the walls for some kind of whole home audio system unless your plans around that are pretty definite.

Dennis Gardner

I guess that humor in print is something that is lost on the Hawaiian culture too. wink, wink.....