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    Building a new house

    I am building my house in Broken Arrow Okla. It is about 3331 square feet. I get the 3rd car garage for my workshop, and one of the upstairs bedrooms for my batcave. My wife gets the study off the entryway because she says I keep too much electronics stuff around to look good for guests. So I get one of the two upstairs rooms. (sad, I know) But one of the things she is insisting on is that I run conduit for future wiring so I don't drill holes inside closets and recessed lighting like I did in the previous house I owned.

    Anyway, I need advice from some of you professionals.

    I found that PVC rigid conduit is WAY cheaper than metal conduit. I will have to run conduit everywhere. (not really but lots of places). So I am thinking I will have 4 areas for wiring. Garage, dressing closet, upstairs batcave, and attic. It is a 2 story with walk in storage in the attic. I think wiring is all I would put there, because of the heat and cold and moisture in Oklahoma. Attics can get to 150 degrees in summer. I will put a temp sensor up there too. We have radiant heat barrier system installed under the roof, so we will see how well that works. . . .

    But I was thinking of 2" conduit between the different areas, and 3/4" conduit in the walls to the touchscreens and keypads for future wiring. Also probably 1-1/4" to several outside areas for the light beams and outside connections on gates, and stuff like that.

    The conduit for 2" is about 5$ for a 10 foot length, so it will not be that bad. Do I need 2 conduits between the different places?

    I am not a home theater person, I just like to automate. So not ALOT of RG6, but some.

    I was thinking of plywood mounting walls for laying everything out.

    The builder decided after describing what I wanted to just let me do it.

    Suggestions? (other than run 2-3 times what I think I will need?)
    A computer's attention span is as long
    as it's powercord.

    #2
    My last house was pretty much like you describe. What I did was run 4 2" thin wall plastic conduits from basement to attic for future expansion. If you do that much you can get wire almost anywhere in the house, either from above in the attic or in the basement to the first floor. The only rub is the first floor ceiling, that you'll have to give a little thought to, speakers, motions, etc. I put pretty much everything in the basement, there was no reason for it to be upstairs. Wiring panels, audio amplifiers for WHA, security panels, pretty much everything that I didn't need to get to much. Home theater was the only exception, that equipment I had in the home theater.

    My current house I did a pretty much the same way except I had more time, everything still is tucked away out of sight. I did put 6 port plates with 3 Cat5e and 3 RG6 on each of the four wall in every room, over kill I know but the wife changes furniture around a lot. Security I wired ahead of time as well, it's just easier to tell the builder to take the week off while you're in there.

    After the inspectors were done with the electrical I came in and did my own inspection before they started dry-walling, I was glad I did.
    Marty
    ------
    XPpro SP3 /w HS Standard 2.5.0.80, HSTouch Server - 1.0.0.70, HSTouch Client 1.0.0.73 HSTouch Android - 1.0.0.2, HSTouch iPhone - 1.0.0.2
    Playing with HS3 a bit but it's just play at this point.

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      #3
      Put the extra deep boxes in for your wall switches. Nice to have that room when you put the somewhat bulky automation switches in. I also ran some smurf tubing with nothing in it so that I had an easy way to get wire up into the attic from my basement (those projects that pop up years later). I also put in a whole house surge (an X-10 friendly one).

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by nightwalker View Post
        After the inspectors were done with the electrical I came in and did my own inspection before they started dry-walling, I was glad I did.
        Sounds like another story there Marty . . .
        A computer's attention span is as long
        as it's powercord.

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          #5
          Yea it was, seemed a heating guy thought a couple of wires were in his way. Instead of saying something he just cut them and kept going. I would have gone crazy trying to get my dining room speakers working. The wires he cut were to the ceiling speakers and I never would have be able to get them back in the ceiling after the place was rocked.
          Marty
          ------
          XPpro SP3 /w HS Standard 2.5.0.80, HSTouch Server - 1.0.0.70, HSTouch Client 1.0.0.73 HSTouch Android - 1.0.0.2, HSTouch iPhone - 1.0.0.2
          Playing with HS3 a bit but it's just play at this point.

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            #6
            I would have charged him for that.

            The more I look around, I think that flexible conduit will work for the inwall stuff and pvc for the long runs between the wiring areas.

            I have a lot of installation to do in a short while.

            I really think that conduit is the way to go for me. I will probably run the speaker wire inside the conduit as I go, but wait for the walls to be up for the rest of the wiring.

            Just an fyi, when my church ran conduit during the building process, they used shop vac's and tied twine to some plastic walmart sacks, and sucked them through the conduit.
            A computer's attention span is as long
            as it's powercord.

            Comment


              #7
              keep in mind, if you are going to run conduit, over-estimate! once the conduit is half full and you come back to run more, the fish tape will intertwine among the existing wires and it can be hard to get additional wires in. When I built my addition (which was bigger than the original house) I only used conduit between the two attics (I used 2 4") and they got full really fast. In the walls I just coiled the extra wiring in the wall and took a thousand digital pictures and video. When I want to know where it is I go back and look thru photos
              Over The Hill
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                #8
                I did this in my house and it has worked incredibly well over the years. Here are some tips:

                1) Install the largest conduit that can be attached to a gang box for pipes going vertically in walls. I think this was about 1 inch or so if I remember. You want the wire to have a clean shot into the box to make it easy.

                2) I ran five 2-inch conduits from the garage to the attic that is separated from the garage and am glad I did. There are lots of sensors that can be placed in the garage area. Other areas have less depending how many future cables might be passing through from one area to another distant area.

                3) Use electrical plastic conduit instead of plumbing as the interior has a smooth finish.

                4) Try to keep the conduits as short as possible as it will make it easier to feed wires. It's better to have 3 shorter pipes to get from A to B than one super-long pipe that goes directly even if the 3 shorter pipes make the total distance further.

                5) Bend the plastic pipes with a gentle sweep using a pipe bender to make them accessible in difficult places like exterior walls in the attic due to the sloping roofline.

                6) Install way more conduits in external walls than you think you will ever need. These walls are the ones that are unforgiving if you need wiring here later and don't have it.

                7) Run all security system wiring directly to the sensor locations without using conduit and sheetrock over it. I did it this way and don't ever see the need to be able to replace these wires in the future.

                8) Cover all conduit openings with duct tape before your insulation is blown-in to keep them clean.

                9) If you want to make it very difficult for someone to cut/disrupt your phone/internet/cable lines, install metal conduits going from the house deep into the ground outside and install the phone demarc, etc, inside the house (yes, you will have to coordinate this with the phone company and agree that you must be home for them to troubleshoot your phone service in the future). Alarm systems aren't helpful without a dial tone.

                Comment


                  #9
                  I've been taking lots of digital pictures, I need to fire up the video camera. I have been thinking about video taping all the walls, and I need to do that.

                  I was thinking about using regular white PVC pipe instead of PVC conduit. Mountainman, is this what you are talking about being rough on the inside, or are you talking about regular metal water pipes? I think the regular PVC would be cheaper and I could probably get bigger pipe that way.

                  Also, I can buy a box of twine for conduit, made especially for that. I will probably pull this and secure it to a nail on a stud. Then when I pull a wire, I pull another length of twine with it so there is always one there.

                  I am planning on connecting the 4 wiring areas to each other with at least 2" pipe. You have me thinking I need more now. I was also thinking of using the flexible conduit for all the walls. Or would you recommend rigid PVC?

                  I was planning on leaving the conduit in the wall and no box so I can cut a hole and install an "old work box" later. At least the conduit would be there. Otherwise, I have boxes with blanks on all the walls. Any opinions on this?

                  Originally posted by Mountainman View Post

                  5) Bend the plastic pipes with a gentle sweep using a pipe bender to make them accessible in difficult places like exterior walls in the attic due to the sloping roofline.
                  I didn't know you could bend the plastic pipe. I thought you had to cut it and put ends on it to get it to go a different way. like 45 or 90 degrees?
                  A computer's attention span is as long
                  as it's powercord.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by sdanks View Post
                    I was thinking about using regular white PVC pipe instead of PVC conduit. Mountainman, is this what you are talking about being rough on the inside, or are you talking about regular metal water pipes? I think the regular PVC would be cheaper and I could probably get bigger pipe that way.

                    Also, I can buy a box of twine for conduit, made especially for that. I will probably pull this and secure it to a nail on a stud. Then when I pull a wire, I pull another length of twine with it so there is always one there.

                    I am planning on connecting the 4 wiring areas to each other with at least 2" pipe. You have me thinking I need more now. I was also thinking of using the flexible conduit for all the walls. Or would you recommend rigid PVC?

                    I was planning on leaving the conduit in the wall and no box so I can cut a hole and install an "old work box" later. At least the conduit would be there. Otherwise, I have boxes with blanks on all the walls. Any opinions on this?

                    I didn't know you could bend the plastic pipe. I thought you had to cut it and put ends on it to get it to go a different way. like 45 or 90 degrees?
                    I'm referring to the gray plastic pipe that is semi-rigid and found in the electrical section of Home Depot and Lowe's. It comes in large and small sizes. It won't bend nearly enough to make a circle out of a 10 foot piece, for example, but it gives somewhat.

                    As long as the pipe allows for the cable to feed through it cleanly with no snags, I don't think it matters if you use something that is flexible or totally rigid.

                    If you install the work boxes with the pipe, you can insert the pipe into the box with no gap between. I have a few spots where the pipe is in the wall with no work box present because I wasn't sure exactly where the cable would be coming out of the wall (it will be behind a TV). It will be somewhere between the two nearest studs.

                    You can bend electrical plastic conduit by using a pipe bender and hot water. This would be better than using connectors/joints because there is nothing that the cable can snag as goes through the turn. You can customize the sweep of the angle precisely for each pipe.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Originally posted by Mountainman View Post
                      You can bend electrical plastic conduit by using a pipe bender and hot water. This would be better than using connectors/joints because there is nothing that the cable can snag as goes through the turn. You can customize the sweep of the angle precisely for each pipe.
                      That's good to know. I was not aware of that.
                      A computer's attention span is as long
                      as it's powercord.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        I used thin wall 2" conduit here, the stuff you use for central vac's. I even used a couple of the sweep joints in places where i needed it to bend and I wanted it to be gentle.
                        Marty
                        ------
                        XPpro SP3 /w HS Standard 2.5.0.80, HSTouch Server - 1.0.0.70, HSTouch Client 1.0.0.73 HSTouch Android - 1.0.0.2, HSTouch iPhone - 1.0.0.2
                        Playing with HS3 a bit but it's just play at this point.

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