|
If you are considering any type
of electronic amenity for your home, make sure you consider installing
a higher grade of wiring. Wiring your home with advanced entertainment,
data and control cabling is regarded as the most important home
improvement you can make.
What is "new" wire?
Wire is wire. It goes behind the walls of your home-providing  electricity
to your home, and bringing cable to your TV and telephone service
to your phone. But today's wire is much more advanced than the wire
that was routinely placed in homes five years ago. If you want your
home to be smart now and in the future, you'll need to install the
right kind of wire-and a lot more of it.
The right wiring facilitates
communication between many different types of electronic systems.
It can prepare your home for new technologies like high definition
televisions, network the computers in your house, allow multiple
TVs to access a movie from one DVD player, distribute music to every
room in your house and help you connect to the Internet faster.
To future-proof your home, wiring
is placed behind the walls during the construction phase and is
"home run" from a central hub to every room where you
might eventually want a TV, security camera, telephone or computer.
The hub is the heart of the wiring
system. It receives signals from outside services like satellite,
cable and telephone, and sends those signals to multimedia outlets
where the appropriate equipment is plugged in. Modules "plugged
into" the hub route audio, video and data signals throughout
the house.
The multimedia outlets resemble
standard electrical wall outlets in size and shape, but also contain
telephone jacks and cable jacks. Like the hub it's connected to,
a multimedia outlet can be modified to suit your needs. Multimedia
outlets for a home office might contain more telephone jacks, while
outlets for a home theater might have more cable jacks.
How does it work?
The difference between "old" wire and "new"
wire is found in the  amount
of information that can fit on the line. "Old" telephone
cabling, known as Category 3 twisted pair wiring, can transmit data
at speeds of up to 10 megabits per second (Mbps). "New"
Category 5 cabling, by comparison, moves information at 100 Mbps.
When information on the telephone line moves faster, your computer
modem can download information quicker, your phone lines are less
prone to interference and the computers within your home can network
faster and be more reliable.
"Old" entertainment
"also called coaxial" cabling, known as RG-59, pipes between
600 and 900 million bits of information per second throughout the
house. "New" RG-6 coaxial cabling boasts a much larger
bandwidth, transmitting as much as 1.5 billion bits per second.
With new entertainment cabling in place, you get clearer cable and
HDTV signals.
But what good is all of this
information and speed if it only goes to one TV, computer or telephone?
In addition to using higher quality cabling, a home needs wire running
to every piece of equipment, in every area of the house.
Different installers wire homes
differently. Some like to choose their own brand and number of wires,
and run each line individually to make sure there's no crimping
or damage to the lines.
Other installers prefer to use
structured wiring packages. These wiring packages usually bundle
different types of cabling in one strand of wire. For some installers,
pulling a single wire rather than multiple lines of wires throughout
the house can cut the installation time considerably.
Most installers agree on the
necessity of running two Category 5 and two RG-6 cables to each
multimedia outlet in the house. This way, the hub can receive signals,
like video from a surveillance camera, on one cable, and use the
other cable to send the signal to several TVs in the house.
Although very few of today's
technologies require fiber optic cabling inside the home, some installers
and manufacturers believe that future technologies will require
the amount of information that only fiber optic cabling can carry.
A single strand of optimized optical fiber can carry every phone
conversation in the United States simultaneously. So the power this
new wire will eventually bring into the home is considerable.
Other installers believe that
to truly make a home ready for the future, empty plastic tubing,
or "conduit," needs to be routed between the hub and different
rooms. Any new wiring that comes along can be easily fished through
it.
Category 5 communications cable
and RG-6 coaxial cable are by no means your only choices for wire.
A home also needs speaker cabling for routing music to various rooms
of the house, security cabling for linking sensors to a security
panel and control wiring so that electronic devices can communicate
with a home control system. Although this additional wiring may
not be included in the structured wiring package, you'll also want
this wire installed while the walls are open.
How much does it cost?
"New" wiring like Category 5 and RG-6 cabling, costs only
pennies more per foot than lower-grade cabling. Usually you can
expect to pay between 10 and 20 cents a foot.
The size of the house, the number
of multimedia outlets and the type of wire you want in your house,
will all factor into the cost of wiring. For new homes under construction,
structured wiring systems typically start out between $1,000 and
$2,000 for an average-sized house with modest capabilities. Prices
can more than double if you add wire when the walls of the home
are already closed.
If you add the wiring expense
to your home mortgage, your monthly payment only increases by a
few dollars. But the benefits you gain, and the value you add to
your home, are considerable.
|