Electronic Gadget Ideas for a New House?

pmadden asks: "I'll be building a house this summer (standard straw bale construction, earth plaster, the whole low-tech gig). Naturally, I'll be putting gobs of ethernet in the walls, with drops to the rooms, on the roof, and so on. I'll add wireless too, once it's secure enough to keep all of you out. What gadgets should I plan for, so that I don't have to do a major retrofit? I'll have cables for TPZ cameras, for when they get super-cheap. We'll leave niches for putting in routers and stuff like that. What else? What cool thing will be cheap in a couple of years, leading my wife to ask, 'why didn't you plan for that'? Any recommendations for good Christmas light control systems, and so on?"

Air ducts

[mboverload]

Have two air ducts availiable where your comptuer will be. Then you can pipe the hot air from a rear fan and PSU outside. Even better, you could also attach ducts to the front for ice-cold computing during the night or winter.

Not really gadget-related, but:

[koreaman]

Put TV jacks in every room except bathrooms. I mean it, every room. You never know when the location of your TV will change.

not hight tech but....

[johnpaul191]

my uncle was just in town recently and had the plans to the house he is building. they are putting sockets under the roof overhangs just for christmas lights and they will all go to one or two switches. on one hand it seems silly, but on another it makes a world of sense.

as for everythng else maybe you want to try to keep some conduit space open for the future. honestly who knows what we will be using for TV or internet in even just a few years. will everyone have fibre in the house? will coax be gone? will CAT5 cable be old? is today's CAT5 cable going to be good enough for tomorrow's speeds? i don't know how much it matters in a house setup, but cable is rated for speed.

you might as well plan for ethernet everywhere. wireless is easy, but ethernet is cheap to do from the start. if you put something along the lines of an Audrey http://audreyhacking.com/ [audreyhacking.com] in the kitchen, it would be nice to have the wires ready to go.

an x10 controlled house will be cool for years

[bitflusher]

what you need to get yourself is everything managable form everywhere. x10 will be nice to electronicly controll your house! lights, alarm system, tv, sterio the whole thing. your server should be able to turn on some lights whenever you accessed it remotely from the bahama's (or probebly from your mothers when your flat broke after building it) http://www.traxsoft.com/emp/tc/myhouse.htm

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, cheap PVC pipe is the way to go, but to make your life simpler, when you install it, make sure you run 2 strings (or better yet, fishing line so you don't break it while pulling) through each section and tape them down. This beats trying to run fishtape after the fact, nad when you inadvertantly pull a cable through with another string attached, you have a back-up.

Oh, and the beauty of PVC, all chemical bonds, with cheap and easily installed Tees and Elbows.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

This was going to be my suggestion (although I was going to suggest running it up to the attic). Some other ideas:

- use conduit to just to bridge potentially problematic doorways or plates.
- Put extra junctions behind blank plates in closets or other easily accessed concealed spaces.
- living rooms, in particular seem to be the worst for having interconnected equipment on all four walls. Bridging the problem gaps is one solution, running at least 8 coax pairs (SVGA+L+R) around the perimeter is another (but not as good).

Most useful:

Put a plug socket in each closet. Aside from providing a place to plug in the vaccuum that's not behind furniture, they're also good for battery chargers, dustbusters, hubs, routers and all that other clutter of modern life that is only lying on the counter/table/desk because it has to be plugged in somewhere.

Coolest:

Conceal cable duct behind removable trim through the entire house.

Re:What to do

[Piquan]

Another good idea: run a string along the conduit. That way, when you have to pull something later, you can pull it on the string (along with a new string). Easier than using fishtape, and (in my not-so-experienced opinion) less concern about cracking fiber.

When you're choosing the conduit's thickness, don't forget that you're likely to have some runs with some thick bits of cable; for example, your home entertainment center may eventually have RG6 (for the TV cable), cat5 and/or fiber (for the home entertainment PC and/or TiVo), four pairs of speaker wire (to the 7.1 system's surround speakers), a stereo pair of audio signal wires (to the house music distribution panel), plus some stuff I haven't considered. You'll need some more room in the bends to make sure that there's plenty of space and cables don't get kinked; cable kinking can do icky things to signals even when it doesn't affect DC.

I'm no architect, so I don't know how much your choice of building materials here is going to affect fire risk. Talk to a pro to make sure that the conduit doesn't make your home into a firetrap (by channeling fire to all the house walls quickly). You may need to use plenum cables at some points. But again, I'm not a pro.

Re:Not really gadget-related, but:

[Karl Tacheron]

Would it be possible to but plastic piping in the walls where wires could be really easily placed? This kind of system would allow for easy implementation of future wiring.

Re:Since the future is wireless...

[timeOday]

I'm not so sure the future is wireless. Cat 5 is just so fast, so cheap, so reliable, not to mention secure. For new construction, it would just be silly not to lay down Cat 5 if not fiber.

extra ventilation pipes might be a good idea.

[ColePEET]

You never know when you might start smoking. Or even if you want to repaint a room down the road, you can be like "Wow, that was easy, because I installed the ventilation to help the paint dry 20 years ago..."

Re:Wire for DC!

[wronskyMan]

Not a good idea- the reason high voltages are used is power=voltage*current, so for a given device, a higher voltage will mean a lower current; since resistive losses are poroportional to the square of the current, you will need MUCH thicker wires for DC (on the order of 1/2"). For example, common household 120V circuits are reated at 15A; if your computer uses 15A@12V from its power supply, this means only 1.5A@120V is needed, letting you use 8-9 computers (theoretically) on the same circuit, whereas if you ran DC, you would need a separate circuit for each computer or very thick wiring.

Use the NEC!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Using conduit is a great idea. I can't recommend it enough. Make sure it's installed according to the National Electric Code and local regulations though. There's some regulations as to how many bends you can put in a conduit run without using a condulet, pull-L, etc. There's also regulations about the types of materials you can use. (EMT, ENT, MC cable, etc.) You'll also have to look at your box fill and conduit fill calculations.

Another thing to consider is separation between certain types of communication cables to avoid interference. I shouldn't need to say it but I will anyway: Never run communication cable and power in the same raceway!

It may be a pain but in the long run, it'll help you out. When you go to sell you're house, some buyers might object to purchasing a house that's not up to code. Also, if the place burns down and the insurance company finds out that it's not up to code, they'll deny your claim.

By the way, I'm a building engineer with an electrician's license. When in doubt, hire a licensed electrician.

Planning for future.

[Z00L00K]

What I would do is to install empty tubes (conduits) in walls, roof and floor together with some empty electrical boxes. This would allow for ability to insert additional cables afterwards.

Depending on where you live, the availability of some items may vary. Here in Sweden we have SELGA, that has the tubes [selga.se] and the boxes [selga.se]

In the US you have Home Depot that can provide you with boxes and flex conduits. (couldn't find any hard conduits right away on their web site, but I know that they have.)

Considering that you build a house with straw insluation, I actually would go for metal boxes and conduits together with arc-fault breakers to try to keep the risk of fire caused by electricity at a minimum. Even though the metal boxes and conduits themselves are an added risk of shorts, the sparks will be contained better.

Re:Wire for DC!

[hankwang]

DC wiring? Voltage dividers at each location? Are you nuts?

And in addition to the things you mention, you will get horrible grounding problems as soon as you connect two devices that were supposed to have independent power supplies. Maybe one of them uses a virtual ground at +2.5 V (e.g. computer loudspeakers), while the other doesn't (most digital electronics). Connect both to a computer and you will burn both of them, and possibly the router downstairs that is connected through the ethernet cable as well. And if you don't burn anything, the least you'll get is noise problems due to grounding loops.

AC transformers can easily be greater than 90% efficient. [...] will draw around 65 mW with no load - far less than the 1-5 watts you've claimed.

I doubt that an AC transformer designed for a maximum load of 5 W will have 90% efficiency if the load is only 0.05 W. Most wall warts that I know feel slightly warm to the touch even if the connected device is switched off. That must be much more than 65 mW.