How To Wire A Smart Home, A look at the top wiring trends of 2021

what's up everybody by popular demand we are finally updating our what to wire for your smart home video it has been like three years here we go if you've seen our original video a lot of things are pretty similar we're gonna cover a few updates we're gonna go through the whole list in case this is the first time you've seen it but right out of the gates let's talk about cat six cat six is the wonder wire when in doubt use cat six now you're probably gonna ask me if you should use cat 6 or cat 6a or cat 7 or cat a here's the thing i want you to understand a lot of people think that when we go up cat 6 cat 7 cat a that we're increasing the bandwidth rather than a way to say it is instead of being able to push 10 gigs we're pushing 20 gigs or 40 gigs thing to remember with cat is as we go from cat 5e to cat 6 to cat 7 what's changing mostly is the distance we can send that signal so cat 6 we can run the full 10 gigs up to about 150 feet 130 150 feet cat 6a we can go the full 300 feet okay those are the primary differences and so we worry a lot less in the home about using cat 6a or cat 7 or cat 8. we almost exclusively used cat 6. i did a post on instagram recently and a ton of dealers reached out and said hey we agree with everything you said except for tvs a lot of video distribution companies like crestron for example require that you use a shielded cat or a cat 6a for the video distribution so what those dealers said is they'll run a cat 6a for one of the cat sticks to their tv and then they'll usually run cat 6 for everything else so that's usually what we recommend for cat we use cat6 everywhere and we'll start encouraging that you run one cat 6a to each tv unless you're running conduit or fiber and that leads me to the next one fiverr so we'll talk about this in a section later on in the video but for fiber we recommend using om3 multi-mode duplex fiber inside the home there's different types of fiber that seems to be adequate to future-proof the home inside the home you're going to have the main feed coming from the utility providers to the outside of the home we do something different from there we'll talk about it in a minute so with that in mind let's get going what should you wire in your home this time we're going to start with kind of the big hitters and work down to smaller hitters first one on the list is tv it's the most important thing it's the one we want to get right okay we recommend a minimum of three cats six one rg six and either a fiber or a conduit usually we just run fiber i'll talk about conduit in a minute now a lot of people hear this and they go why three cats six we already talked about one cat six being a cat6a and the other two being just regular cat six the tv needs hardwired network preferably the tv may also need hardwired control that's separate from the network so we're running network to the tv and then it's getting controlled via ir or serial so that requires a second cat 6. then your video feed if you're doing balance or video distribution is going to need a cat 6 for video that's the one you're going to use the cat6a for now if you have anything else behind that tv if you're doing things localized like roku or xfinity boxes or you have some kind of a power supply that can be remotely triggered to power cycle you're going to want ethernet for each one of those so it's very possible that you could need five six seven cat six behind the tv we don't normally see that and we know in advance that we're gonna have products behind the tv each of which require ethernet then we'll run more cat6 to the tv we usually run fiber i'll come back to fiber in a minute and then conduit i'll come back to conduit in a minute okay but that's typically what we run up the tvs audio we run speaker wires for audio all throughout the house and we like to be really aggressive with audio because it's one of those places where when you start getting into your home and you start listening to music you realize you'd like to have the music everywhere and it's so cheap relatively speaking to put wire in the home for speakers if you're thinking you might put speakers in that location go ahead and run a wire there there's locations like the shower the patio the front patio the back deck hallways that people underestimate and later decided they want to have speakers so we had a client years ago that's a big party person and he wanted to have friends come over and have a blanket of sound all throughout the house the foyers the walkways everywhere so that's you then you can put additional speaker wires i've had a client recently tell me through the design service that he knew he was only going to listen to music in two rooms he was in his 70s he'd had a home for years with an audio system so for him he only wired up a couple of rooms that's fine but if in doubt put speaker wire in every single room of the house in every area that you think you might listen to audio remember audio doesn't just have to be music it can be audio books it can be podcasts anything that you're listening to on your phone you can potentially stream to the speakers throughout the house we usually keep it pretty simple on speakers we just do 16 4 or a couple of 16 2 for each room unless you're doing some kind of hi-fi setup or you bought some really nice speakers you've got powerful amplifiers then we would upgrade the wire to 14 4 or 4 or 12 for whatever the case requires but normally we're going to keep it pretty simple with your audio now a lot of people will have a hi-fi setup so they'll do regular audio all throughout the house and then they'll have a room like a yoga room or just kind of their zen room maybe it's a sitting room off the master where they're going to do a hi-fi setup with some bookshelf or floor standing speakers some vinyl some separate amplifiers and there we would run a little bit different setup of wire again we would look at the application we would run better gauge wire maybe you can use quest whatever the case is and put better wire in the room for the hi-fi setup we get asked a lot about volume control we rarely if ever run volume control anymore most the systems today you're gonna run and manage the system from your phone or from a tablet or some keypad on the wall and a lot of music systems on the market it voids the warranty when you use a traditional analog volume control so we can run volume control we do run volume control but we see it rarely like i would say less than five percent of the projects we do have a volume control in this mixer landscape speakers landscape speakers wire up a little bit differently usually what we do is we run a home run for each zone of audio to an area on the exterior of the home closest to that zone that's not going to be impeded by something like a concrete patio so when we're ready to finish the landscaping and connect it all the way out to the landscape zone then there's nothing impeding it it's easy for us to get to that wire trench it or bury it and we usually try and have the landscapers trench it because it's a pain so try and sync that up you can give them the burial grade speaker wire and let them trench it for you when they're doing sprinklers and whatever get it out to the zone that you're going to use for your speakers we're not going to dive too much into what type of wire to use we've got a free download and checklist at the end of the video we'll link to as well as our pre-wire e-book and that's going to specify and go way more into the details of exactly what type of wire to use but people ask about landscape speakers you run 116 4 for each zone of landscape speakers so if you have a fire pit that's one zone if you have a pool that's a second zone you have a sport court that's a third zone you'd run 3 16 4 to an area exterior of the house that you can later connect to for those zones next up surround sounds you're gonna have primary and secondary surround sounds just like it sounds your primary surround sound is your theater your media room you're likely gonna have better better speakers better amplifiers you're usually gonna use a higher grade wire for your speakers something like 14 2 or 12 2. your secondary surround sounds you can but most of the time with your secondary surround sound you're going to use this basic speaker wire it's going to be a sound bar some inexpensive speakers in the ceiling or the in wall so we're not as concerned about the quality of the wire we're going to keep it pretty simple but you do want to consider areas in the home where you might want a sound bar what we consider a secondary surround sound game rooms master bedrooms great rooms pools barbecues decks places where you're watching the big game or the movie or the concert and you want to have better sound in that room than what the tv is going to bring to you that's an area where you would wire secondary surround sound so sound bars and extra speakers next up we've got your network we're going to run wires to your wireless access points but we also want to run ethernet to every device that has a permanent location so blu-ray players apple tvs desktop computers phones anything that's permanent it's not going to move it's not mobile we're not going to pick it up and carry it through the house we want to run an ethernet connection to that device every single one of them okay that's going to maximize the wireless experience for your wireless devices if everything that's permanent is hardwired into the network so we want to be really aggressive there with cat6 and run ethernet to everything that's got a permanent location security is a mixed bag you have people that are like you have to wire your security and you have people who just want to go wireless number one make sure you wire your security keypad regardless of whether or not you're doing a wireless system or a hardwired system hardwire your keypads for power it's going to save you a headache and it just looks better if the home is bigger than 3 000 square feet you need to hardwire your sensors the wireless systems struggle in sizes bigger than 3 000 square feet we went through training with vivint a year ago and they actually said in the training that when the home starts to get much over 3000 square feet they actually start recommending to the client that they use a different company or a different product better suited for homes that size because it's better if they're hardwired i also recommend if it's a home over 3000 square feet that you wire for repeaters for whatever reason security wiring just doesn't hold up during construction it gets beat up every door that you've wired if you wire up ten doors in a house three or four of them are going to be broken or mangled and they're not going to work you're going to have to end up swapping those to wireless contacts so you do the best you can you try and wire what you can but you anticipate there's going to be some bad wires when you get to the other side so those wireless repeaters are going to give you kind of a get out of jail cards so you can extend the range and make sure you have good coverage for all the different sensors you're going to deploy in your home next up are cameras people always ask if they should do analog or ip cameras just run cat6 you have the option to convert it either way so it's an analog camera you can use your cat6 if it's an ip camera you can use your cat6 that's the easy way to do it you don't have to worry about it i also like to run two cat6 to every location on the off chance the cat6 gets damaged it's pretty cheap to run another one but just like speakers once you fire up your cameras and you start looking at it clients regularly find that they want more cameras than they wired for it's so easy to just pull two cameras to every location that's usually what we do a rule of thumb is we cover the exterior entrances so all doors garages as well as hazards like a pool we're going to cover with the camera after that we used to say cover the corners we don't do that as much anymore because most people don't care about the corners if the key entrances are covered but there may be a walkway by a fence or between a home where you're particularly concerned throw a wire there for a camera if you need it you've got the option next up are touch screens and voice control so this gets back to the idea of cat6 anywhere you think you might want a touch screen throw up a cat6 and it can be used for a touch screen or for voice control from companies like josh.ai if you think you might want both in the same room run a cat 6 for each you don't have to use it you don't have to use a touch screen touch screens can be tabletop mounts so can the voice control but if you want it to be in the wall sort of that architectural design look then you want to run a cat6 shades is a really interesting one because it's different with every manufacturer it's one of the few things when we're talking about wiring your home we can't just pre-wire and future proof perfectly every manufacturer has slightly different requirements for wiring if you look at draper as an example they have some shades that are high voltage you have to run electrical wire for power and then you run low voltage for control or you use wireless to control and then they have other shades in their line that are exclusively low voltage so depending on the size the window you're going to have different wire requirements lutron on the other hand is exclusively low voltage and to make it more challenging the requirements for lutron's low voltage shades are different than the requirements for draper's low voltage shades so you're best on shades to make a decision before pre-wire of which manufacturer and which shades you're going to use find out from them exactly what the wiring specifications are for every one of the shades you're putting in your package and then wire the home accordingly but if that's not you if you don't know for sure you're going to motorize shades or it might be something that budget doesn't allow until down the road then what we recommend is one of two things use lutron wire from ice cable so ice cables not lutron it's a cable manufacturer out there that makes a wire called lutron wire specifically for lutron shades and you can cheat it and use the shield in the lutron wire for some other shade companies that have different specifications they'll frown on that a little bit but we know that it can be done if you're not going to do that our other recommendation is to run 2 cat 6 and 2 16 2 or a 16 4 to every shade location in the home so utilities is one of the less sexy parts of pre-wiring your home we're talking about the internet feed coming into the side of the home your satellite if you're in an area where it's satellite internet but one of the big ones that people forget that you should consider are cell boosters that's something new to us we haven't done as often but we've started doing more of it cell boosters use a coax cable that's like on steroids it's twice the size of an rg6 it's real big and you run that to an antenna on the outside of the home and then you have sort of smaller antennas in locations throughout the home and that helps you boost the sell signal on the inside of the home so you don't have crappy coverage from your cell phone inside the home now if you have a cell phone that does the wi-fi calling it's not as important but it's definitely something to consider if you're in an area that gets poor cell coverage lastly to wrap this all up let's talk about fiber and conduit now fiber there's different types of fiber and just like cat the different fibers are used for different lengths and different applications commercially residentially but we've standardized on om3 multi-mode duplex fiber we use clear line fiber because it's so simple to use we don't have to worry about breaking the glass if we pull on it too hard or if we bend it a little bit more than we should it seems to survive we don't have to wear the gloves we're not going to get the glass splinters like you would with other fiber and it's really easy to terminate later we leave the fiber unterminated unless we know for certain that we're going to use it that saves some cost to you until you're ready to use it and you can pay the expense of terminating at that time now you can run fiber anywhere you would put a cat6 we always run the cat6 regardless but the places where we typically run fiber are tvs and wireless access points we don't run fiber to cameras we don't usually run fiber to all the ethernet ports although you could if you want to the one place where fiber is different is the demarcation your service providers are going to bring a single mode fiber to the outside of the home and they will not connect the single mode fiber to the inside of the home and you don't know for sure what type of fiber they're going to bring until it happens so we run conduit from the media rack or low voltage panel out to the demarcation whatever fiber they bring to the outside of the home we're able to match it through the conduit and then we can convert it to whatever we need on the inside of the home so for the demarcation fiber we still run the wires we've always recommended a couple of cat6 some coax some 16-4 but we run conduit that's dedicated specifically for the fiber so we can match up whatever the internet provider is bringing in and that brings me to the last one conduit so thing about conduit conduits the gold standard for future proofing nothing future proofs better than conduit the caveat is that conduit does go bad i know people think this is crazy but you would be surprised how many times we've had a projector and the conduit was crushed and we couldn't pull hdmi or fiber or cat6 to the projector and that's why when we recommend wiring for a projector today we run cat6 and fiber to the projector outside of conduit and then we run a separate dedicated conduit that we can pull hdmi through later if for whatever reason the conduit goes bad we have as a get out of jail card some cat six and some fiber at that location we can throw balance on and turn into whatever the latest and greatest hdmi tech is and keep updating it as time goes on we hope the conduit will be intact but on a regular basis it's not think about conduit if you've ever tried to pull it it's kind of a pain in the butt it does go bad there's actually specifications about how long runs can be versus how many bends and turns there are without adding pull boxes and part of the reason for that is the longer it gets and the more turns you have the harder it gets to pull something through that even if it's taped off and you've got gel in there and you're trying to make it easy it can be problematic if you've got 10 tvs and 10 inch and a half conduits plus conduit to everything else all of a sudden you have a closet and it is unmanageable all the conduit that's in that room so if you're person that wants to put conduit in by all means put conduit in good for you what we typically do is we run conduit to the primary tvs or projector in the home you're gonna have a bunch of tvs that are like kids bedrooms or the laundry room or the garage where you really don't care all that much but then you're going to have your main viewing room where you want the maximum quality you can get 4k 8k hdr dolby vision all of that and you want it as good as it can possibly be that's where we suggest running conduit so you've maximized your option for the future but still run your fiber in your cat6 likewise for your projector and your screen the other place where we like conduit is if you can put some kind of like a plumber pipe as a chase up to the attic or a basement from the rack so that gives you an ability to get to the attic if you have to pull things from the roof and get back down to the rack we don't like to use smurf tube for that we want something that's more rigid that's bigger two inches three inches so that we can put a ton of wire through that or a couple of those otherwise we stay pretty clear of conduit so that's our advice on what to wire for your home dealers out there will use different processes as homeowners you will use different processes that's fine this is kind of where we've standardized and what we've used for hundreds and hundreds of systems we've used this for systems all over the country and it's never got us into any kind of trouble we've always been able to get to the other side of the project installing and programming everything that client want using this is kind of our template and guide and to help you out we've got a link here below to our free checklist full disclosure when you check on the free checklist there'll be an offer for the ebook that you can't anywhere else some people get upset that we're offering an ebook so i'm just telling you straight up there's a free checklist and when you check out the free checklist there'll be an offer to buy the ebook if you don't want the ebook that's great don't get it get the free checklist it's going to tell you everything that you should run in your house if you have any questions you can hit us up online we'd love to hear comments below on how you wire your home or questions you have to this video and as always we appreciate it if you would like subscribe and share this with your friends [Music]

Channel: Tym Smart Home & Home Theater Design

Views: 80,876

Keywords: TYM Smart Homes & Home Theaters, TYM homes, TYMhomes, Home Theater, Smart Home, Home Cinema, Home Theater Design, Smart Home Howto, Howto Home Theater, DIY Smart Home, DIY Home Theater, Matt Montgomery

Id: wnac20HPlR0

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021