Bought a house

So I recently bought a house and it needs some work before I actually move in, so I've been doing a lot of demo (ripping up floors, tearing out cabinets, removing broken plaster walls, replacing with drywall, etc.) Anyway, now that I'm getting to this point of having a skeleton, I was thinking about when I move in how I want to set up my home network.
I'm looking for ideas and any examples of what everyone else has setup throughout their house. I'm thinking of setting up one of the bedrooms as a home office, but having a thin client in the living room so I can connect back to my PC and watch my movies in .avi format on the plasma while sitting on the couch instead of on my little 19" monitor sitting in an office chair (and yes, they are legal, when I was in the military we always had to pack light, so I'd rip DVDs I bought so I only had to pack a hard drive and not a 100 DVDs).
Anyway, that was just one idea. Any others are well appreciated. And feel free to go to the extremes, it's fun to dream, right?
Extreme example: I thought it would be cool to network a Siemens environmental control so I could turn heat, A/C, lights, curtains, etc on and off from my blackberry when I was about to come home, shame it doesn't look financially possible at the moment.

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Comments

darkerosxx

If you can afford it, run cat5/6 cable to every room in the house and have it all connect to a closet. It's a great investment and adds to the home value. It's no longer just a nerd's toy!

tiersten

darkerosxx wrote:

If you can afford it, run cat5/6 cable to every room in the house and have it all connect to a closet. It's a great investment and adds to the home value. It's no longer just a nerd's toy!

Put a couple pull strings into the conduit as well so you can add something in the future without ripping apart the walls.

Add several cables going to each point and have several points in each room if you can. Running CT100 depends on whether you're going to have everything centralised or not. You can paper/paint/plaster over the unused wall boxes anyway.

One final thing. Check the building codes for your area to see if you need to do anything special about your cable and whether you need a specific type like low smoke etc...

If you want to do home automation then doing the mains cabling for sockets, lights and switches will depend on what system you use. If you've got enough money + time to do so then you can have everything run back to a central wiring closet which you can convert to normal wall switch operation if you ever leave and want to take your stuff.

networker050184

tiersten wrote:

Put a couple pull strings into the conduit as well so you can add something in the future without ripping apart the walls.

That is very good advice. You never know when you might need to run more cable.

dynamik

You might want to check out one of the earlier www.hak5.org episodes. I remember they used a little IR device to remote turn a light on/off via a web page. You might want to look into doing something similar if you're on a tight budget. That'd probably be more fun anyway

I'll post the exact episode if I can find it. It looks like it might be episode one or two from the first season.

learningtofly22

tiersten wrote:

darkerosxx wrote:

If you can afford it, run cat5/6 cable to every room in the house and have it all connect to a closet. It's a great investment and adds to the home value. It's no longer just a nerd's toy!

Put a couple pull strings into the conduit as well so you can add something in the future without ripping apart the walls.

Add several cables going to each point and have several points in each room if you can. Running CT100 depends on whether you're going to have everything centralised or not. You can paper/paint/plaster over the unused wall boxes anyway.

One final thing. Check the building codes for your area to see if you need to do anything special about your cable and whether you need a specific type like low smoke etc...

If you want to do home automation then doing the mains cabling for sockets, lights and switches will depend on what system you use. If you've got enough money + time to do so then you can have everything run back to a central wiring closet which you can convert to normal wall switch operation if you ever leave and want to take your stuff.

Plenum grade cabling won't add much more to the price, and you'll know you're in code. Plenum's the most compliant there is for in-wall installations.