What, when building a house, are the necessary wires (beside 120v) to future proof my house, Cat6, Coax, low voltage, and alarm wires?
07.06.2025 17:53
Most people have a doorbell or two, maybe a Ring. I don’t here - we forgot, and no-one much comes to the door anyway.
I wired the sitting room for home theatre, with 7.1 speakers. That worked out fairly well with everything mostly hidden.
UPS circuits with external batteries
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I answered this question around 1990, on Usenet. So here we are over 40 years later, with much the same question.
Basement lair:
In 1990, I suggested conduit for maximum flexibility. Then you can pull what cable you need later. Now, for maximum flexibility, I’d probably suggest drop ceilings above which you could add anything you wanted, with conduit drops to room outlets. That’s more typical of commercial premises. Some just have a high open ceiling and spray everything black.
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The ribbed conduit was a mistake - smooth conduit with sweeps would be better. It was hard to pull pre-made HDMI cables.
When I built my last house in 1985, we were still on dialup. The phone company ran landlines in a star configuration to most of the rooms, and I later split one off for a separate fax line. I ran twisted pair for outside door and window sensors, but made a rookie mistake and didn’t allow enough slack. When the house settled a couple of the wires broke, but I could still use the working ones. The alarm system also had a phone jack for a dialler. It wasn’t a great success and I gave up using it. In principle it could remind me if there was a window open somewhere. I really wanted to put a sensor in the lock so it could tell if the doors were locked, but the pre-hung door didn’t really allow that. Might be worth consulting a professional - in a real burglary later a guy came through the front door, where the sensor was broken anyway, and never touched a window. Modern systems seem to use battery-powered wireless motion sensors rather than a lot of wired switches.
The satellite receiver, DVD player, audio processor are in the console on the floor below the TV, with cable to the satellite antenna (via the wiring closet) and one cat6. The TV has 120V and cat6. It turns out that both the satellite receiver and audio processor want cat6, but really only for software updates. I’d have to add a switch if I wanted both at once.
Are Americans really as uneducated and ignorant as portrayed in the media?
Back then we still had thickwire ethernet, and thinwire (co-ax), which were rings, and the emergence of ethernet hubs, which required star connections and Cat 4. Different ways or wiring things, requiring different routing. Now we have ethernet switches, so still a star connection - everything goes to a wiring closet on each floor, then a trunk connects switches on each floor to the main internet router. In a house as opposed to a business or apartment block, probably only one wiring closet for the entire house - mine is in the basement alongside the 120V breaker panel.
I also ran 75ohm co-ax and twisted-pair in daisy-chains without any specific idea in mind, apart from “networking”. It turned out that thinwire required 50ohm, but 75ohm was good for analog TV. We had cable TV, who wanted to charge extra for extra outlets. So I had just one outlet on a shelf going to the VCR, and used my 75ohm to feed the TV and other rooms with cable splitters. Which I hardly used. The twisted-pair I later used for a battery-powered intercom to my kids rooms, so I could tell them supper was ready. Later with a cable modem and cat5 ethernet, I drilled down from the attic and fished cable through the walls to my kids rooms (no, they didn’t spend all their time online watching porn or playing games).
In one of the conference rooms at work we had a fibre outlet for fibre-to-desktop for high-bandwidth networking, but never used it. Copper cat6 later went up to 1Gbps or better, which is generally adequate, but if you think you might need 50Gbps or something, running fibre might be an idea. Terminating it is more complex than ethernet.
Later, at work, I configured meeting rooms for videoconferencing. One thing I did was run conduit to the floor under the table, so we had 120V for laptops, plus ethernet, plus a landline jack for a speakerphone, plus wiring for tabletop microphones. That’s nice to have to avoid running cables across the floor. In my new house built in 2019, I have floor power under the dining room table (where I’m typing now) and near the sofa in the sitting room. I was thinking table lamp, but it’s only got used a few times to charge a phone while on a video call. I vaguely regret not getting an ethernet jack under the table.
For the new house, I have spots for wall-mounted TV in most rooms, with 120V, cat6, and 75ohm for satellite TV. Only 3 are occupied, and only 1 has satellite. I have cat6 wall jacks in a couple of rooms, and somewhat regret not getting a couple more. I have cat6 with PoE to a couple of places on the ceiling for a WiFi hotspot, copied from my workplace.
Low voltage: What voltage, and why ? 12V DC ? 48V ?. 10 years ago I’d have suggested 12VDC with RV lead-acid batteries for emergency off-grid lighting. Now I’d suggest just using 120V AC LED lighting with an inverter. I have three circuits with a UPS inline; one for some lighting so I don’t need to go to bed in the dark, one for some wall outlets, and one for the TV and internet. I recently ran another conduit to a shed so I can power the UPS from a generator during a power outage). What I regret is not splitting out the fridge and freezer circuits so I can power them direct from the generator - they go to a breaker panel in the basement, which is impossible.
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I have cat6 with PoE for external IP security cameras. Only two positions are occupied, and they’re really for a virtual “window” in my basement lair so I can see outside.