Help with Wiring New House

[jrapps]

You know the expression be careful what you wish for?

I am building a new house and I have the opportunity to run as many RG6U Quad Shielded Coax, Phone, and Cat6 Ethernet lines to each room as I want as part of the building process. However I am at the point where I need to decide exactly how many of each wire to run and I need some guidance from you all. I will be using 2 Vip722s (although I can see adding a 3rd receiver in the future as this is a 6 bedroom house) and will also have a roof mounted HDTV antenna. The house will also come with basic analog cable (not planning on using it much but may come in handy when sat goes out due to rain here in South Florida)

The home will have a central distribution box where all the wires will come together and can then be routed out to each room, which helps to future proof everything but also adds some complications now.

The way I see this, I know I need Coax wires running from the attic to the Distribution box for the Sat feeds and the antenna. Any idea how many Sat feeds I will need?

I diagrammed out the rest, but from this it appears that I need a whopping 21 lines not including the # from the Dish as I don't know how many to ask for that.

Plus, if I want to add a 3rd receiver to the Kid's bedrooms in the future, that will add more as well.

Any suggestions? Should I just go ahead and run all these now to "future proof" the house?

Thanks in advance.

Jason

 

[CowboyDren]

You only need one satellite wire to feed each 722; no need to run dual cables. You should probably use dual RG6 anyway so that you can use the second for the OTA feed, which will eliminate the need for diplexers.

Conversely, the only way to put OTA and cable on the same wire is to switch between them at the distribution center. You could run dual RG6 to each bedroom from the distro center, and use a switchbox at the TV. You can't [shouldn't] do this because the analog cable and the OTA antenna use the same radio frequencies; some of the OTA channels will surely interfere with the cable channels, and it's likely that the cable channels will win.

I don't think there's much benefit to having cable and OTA to each TV, but that is your call.

Since you're only using two 722s, and a 1000.2 or 1000.4 dish can each feed three dual-tuner boxes, there's no need for a multiswitch; just shotgun all three LNB outputs from the dish to the distro center, and fork off to the rooms you want to feed. Use two cable/ant distribution blocks, one dedicated to each, at the same location. Something like this unit:

On-Q/Legrand at Lowe's: 8-Way Video Module

Naturally, one would have antenna input, the other would have cable input. With dual RG6 transport to each room, you'd just mix'n'match your inputs to a given room.

Also, make sure the builder uses 3GHz RG6, not RG6 Quad-Shield; you don't need the shielding, and it makes life harder down the road.

 

[cparker]

I'd run 2 RG6QS and 2 cat6E (satellite and antenna to each location + network and phone to each location.... yes cat6 can be used as phone... take care of that at your patch panel) to each room location. If you don't have antenna, you can use the other RG6 to backfeed to another TV. This might mean running to more than one location in EACH ROOM... I mean.... what if you want to rearrange the furniture?

NOTHING is future-proof, so do yourself a HUGE favor and run smurf pipe to each room location and pull your wiring through that. This way if you want to add some kind of connectivity later (like fiber?), you can just pull it through the smurf.

"smurf pipe" is corrugated, flexible conduit for low voltage stuff.

I used 3GHz RG6 quad shield. Some folks say you don't need the extra shielding and that the connectors are harder to put on. I just haven't had a problem with the connectors and when running wire through my house I invariably come across instances where I can not conveniently avoid being closer than I'd LIKE to be to some of the regular house wiring. I mean you don't want to run parallel and close to your regular AC wiring, and when you cross it, you want to cross at 90 degrees, but in reality, it just doesn't always seem to work out that way. So I got the quad shield. When you buy it in bulk anyways, it's just not that big of a deal.

SMURF PIPE is your friend! You don't need to get crazy buying special low voltage boxes and connectors and all that crap if you only need to get the wire into an uninsulated stud bay (interior walls), but you may want to think about it on outside walls and you WILL need to do it on outside walls if they're insulating with spray foam.

Run more than you need to more locations than you think you'll ever use and I can darn near guarantee that you'll wish you'd run something to somewhere you didn't. If you go nuts with smurf pipe, you don't HAVE to pull wire into it right now, but it'll be there waiting for you.