Low ⚡Voltage at the Real ReBuild

on the build show today we're talking low voltage you have to attack at a low voice when you talk about low voltage that's right that's all the wires in your house that aren't carrying high voltage now it's kind of an interesting conversation because many of you commented on my high voltage my wiring video matt why are you using such thick gauge wiring my 12-2 wiring when i've got so many led lights in my house and you know honestly that's a pretty good criticism i did have to kind of think twice about that so we're going to get into that a little bit we're also going to get into the sound system i'm doing what kind of wire the panel box and i actually have a really cool product that you've probably never seen before called voltec today's video the low voltage wiring of my house let's get going [Music] all right now when i say low voltage most of you are thinking two types of wires some kind of ethernet wiring which in the past has been maybe cat5 i'm doing cat 6 at my house and then coax and usually you're thinking about some location in the house where there's a low voltage panel box right kind of like your circuit breaker box where all of your electrical wires go this is the same sort of thing except for low voltage now this is my family where my tv is going to be and i purposely built a little closet off of here that on my plans is listed as a media closet that's where all my wiring is going to go to now i did a little bit of a frankenstein on this meaning i had someone pull all these wires from me just on a kind of an hourly basis but i provided all the wire now the main ethernet wire that's this blue cable this is often what we think of when we think of low voltage wiring this is a cat 6 wire it has four stranded pairs in there and i can turn that into an internet jack a place to bring wired internet anywhere in my house i can also use that for cameras and other types of internet type devices let's say now you're also going to notice i have a little bit of this black wire here now this is coax it's a little bit old school tech and not that many years ago anywhere we had a cat 5 wire we would also run coax now i'm not doing that at my house but i am foregoing the traditional cable company where i've got fiber in my neighborhood so all i'm going to do is run a fiber line in and then most of my house of course like yours is going to be wireless but i do want a couple wired locations so let's talk about that and where that's going to be so in my house most of my entertainment consumption these days is internet-based youtube tv netflix amazon prime and i really only have one tv location on my current house and that's what i'm doing here i have a tv location right here and i'm i found a really cool tv no no affiliation with these guys but samsung makes a really cool tv called the frame tv that sits really flush to the wall and i just realized this so i don't have it in yet but that tv requires a separate cable to go from the tv location all the way back to where your media center is going to be and you have to get that actually from samsung so i need to order that it'll be a 30 meter cable and that's going to have all my hdmi locations back there that'll also have power to the tv and one cool thing about that tv is when it's off it looks like a picture on the wall and in fact it'll run on low power and you can get a subscription to their service so i'm going to show monets or you know some other famous painter on the wall there and it won't look like a traditional tv location so i'm pretty excited about that now in the rest of the house i'm running specific locations where i might have a computer plugged in like underneath my stairs here i'll have a desktop and so i'm running a cat 6 wire in a home run fashion meeting from the panel box to here and this could be if i have a desktop machine plugged in there all the time now for all the ethernet for internet for routing all that kind of thing i found a really cool system a really friend a good friend of mine named john helped me kind of specify everything and he got me turned on to unify or ubiquity networks and i'm going to be using their dream machine in the house so i'm going to do a cabinet that will mount on the wall right where my low voltage panel is that will have different units i'm actually using a 19 unit sized panel so i'll basically have 19 unit slots in there where all my ubiquity networks cameras will go to my router all those things as well as stay tuned for a future video i'll show you this in the future but i'm going to have uh under uninterruptible power supply and a couple other cool things so we'll show you that when i finalize but that's also the place in the house where i've run all my speakers back to now i've got a few of them wired now in the ceiling and on the outside of the house but i've decided to use sonos in my house i mentioned this earlier in a video i've got some sonos in my office i have a pair of their speakers on my house and i've had really good success it's just a really easy tech i also like that i can pretty much do it myself now they also make an architectural line of speakers so i'm going to be using some built-in speakers from them as well as some products like the arc which is a really cool sound bar that has some special quality so stay tuned for a video video on that i'll show you some more specifics on that but between the sonos system and the ubiquity which is going to run on my cameras and my low voltage i've got a pretty well priced system and i feel confident enough i'm certainly not a tech guy i'm not i'm not in the i.t business but i feel like with just a little bit of help i can terminate all that and i can hook all that up in my house now one other cool thing that i've got kohler you may have seen my previous video about some of the kohler equipment that i've got in my house they came out with a really cool speaker tile so in my master shower right near my shower head basically right at ear level i've got two kohler tile speakers that will bring sound right in there and my kohler dtv plus digital controller screen in the shower can can control all that so that i can change podcasts i can change music whatever i want if i'm going to sit in the shower and get a steam for 20 minutes that sort of thing now before we move on from low voltage i want to meet you back in the kitchen i'm going to show you a really cool product that you've probably not seen before all right i said earlier when i published my high voltage my electrical video i wired my whole house in 12.2 so that i could do 20 amp circuits but you know several of you commented which really made me think when i'm doing led lighting why do i need that fat 12 2 piece of copper in there and it's interesting you know right after that i found a company based here out of austin called voltec and they make a product that's a little different than this but i've done these a lot in the past this is a i think leviton makes this there's probably some other manufacturers this is a regular 110 outlet that also has some version of usb this happens to be usbc at my house currently i have several of these with usb a's and these are great for charging your gopro your phone that sort of thing but anywhere else you don't have one of these you're going to use a small brick for your phone now when it comes time to turn in your to plug in your laptop though you typically need one of these big bricks if you were to plug your laptop into this there wouldn't be enough juice to plug it in that's why you got it even with this you still need to use your big brick now check this out this company based out of austin has a solution that i thought was really cool this is called voltex and this is a low voltage wired and powered usb outlet they currently make them in a dual usb where you've got a usb a and a usbc and everywhere you have one of these believe it or not you have enough juice not just to charge your phone which certainly you could but you even have enough juice if you plug your laptop in here to eliminate the brick because this has enough power to supply it to your laptop now here's how the system works they make this unit here which is the power conversion this is this demo model right here it's just plugged into an outlet so it's getting 110 power it's then converting that into dc direct current and then in the back of this you're going to see that it's got a bunch of these plugs this one is a 12 this one has the capacity to do 12 of these outlets now we actually plug this one in to show you check this out that now with just a usbc to usbc my macbook pro this is actually alex is on my team that he does a lot of editing on and this is the big one look it's charging this laptop straight off here so now i could put these on my desktop i can put these on the side of my master bed all those places i wouldn't need a brick i can plug in enough juice to even power a laptop with either a usbc or a usb a outlet i thought that was kind of a cool system the other cool thing is this is rack mounted so this will fit in my low voltage rack and i can have my ups my power supply battery backup attached to this so that i could potentially run a couple hours or even if i had a really big one maybe even longer maybe even into days if i had a really big battery attached to this i think that brings a measure of resilience which is kind of cool but i also honestly just like the convenience of these so this 12 unit model i'm putting um an outlet here in my kitchen i'm putting two of them at my wife's desk i'm doing two at my kid's desk i'm doing three or four at my desk and i'm putting two on either side of my bedroom table and those outlets i'm gonna put a little higher so that i could just pull my vanity back not my vanity my sideboard side table rather and plug in my phone and my laptop on the side of the bed kind of a cool system this whole thing you could wire yourself with all the parts we're talking about a thousand bucks or so for all this and the cool thing is this wire is a thin gauge wire this is low voltage wire pretty inexpensive you know this is probably pennies per foot compared to that copper wire that i use for my high voltage which is very expensive now these guys are coming out with a six capacity to do six of these and even smaller power supply so stay tuned for that but i'll put a link in the description uh for them in full disclosure i thought the system was so cool i wanted to put in my house they gave me these materials to do for my house which i thought was pretty cool now this did bring up another thought for me though which is i wonder how long it's going to be before all the led lighting in my house could also be run by this type of thin dc direct current wire there's no big commercial outfit doing that now i suspect that will be in the future but i appreciate you guys commenting on my video about how it was a little strange that i used really thick copper wire when 14 gauge would work just fine i mentioned earlier i'm going to have an internet connection to the house but i'm not doing cable tv or any of those kinds of connections most most of the time as i said earlier i'm can i'm consuming through internet however i did want to watch broadcast tv potentially at times and so believe it or not i'm going to put an old school antenna on the side of my house this is just a 50 model that i got at the local home center nothing special but i found a cool website antennaweb.org i typed in my address and it turns out all the tv stations in austin where i am are basically due west from my house so on the westward side of my house i ran a coax cable out through the soffit and i'm actually going to mount this underneath my soffit and directionally facing straight towards those tv towers which are in west austin now in my house i just have a cheap antenna for my tv that's mounted inside on the wall and i get a darn good signal so i have a feeling with going outside and pointing it in the correct direction i'm going to get terrific service and then this antenna will actually go into my rack mounted tivo i'm an old school tevo fan and this antenna in to my tivo means that i can catch a local sports broadcast of the longhorns playing a football game i can also tape my local nbc affiliate every night because my wife loves watching the 5 30 national news and the local news through antenna so i can fast forward through those commercials so believe it or not even today these antennas especially with digital tv means i've had a great broadcast signal and i don't have to pay anything [Music] hey guys it's been a week or so on the low volt and i had a couple of other epiphanies that i wanted to show you you know this is my first time building a house for myself in my 25 years of building i've had a lot of thoughts rumbling around so a couple additional things i wanted to mention first off my d mark that is the wire to the outside is right here basically these three wires i've got coax i've got fiber and i've got cat6e these are running from the outside where in my case at t fiber is going to pick them they run all the way across the house to my media closet which is in the other side of the house but what happens if i have a cut here i need a new d mark whatever i need to fish a new wire i thought you know it'd be really cheap insurance to add some conduit so this conduit right here which i'll end up cutting off and strapping to the outside right here and then i put a little odi access box this is my pantry by the way so this is not a you know not a main room of the house i put this little od access box so i could pop this off and have access to this to this bottomless pipe this runs all the way up into my top attic we'll go up there and show you where that runs in a minute but that gives me the ability to add another d mark to add a wire for whatever okay so my panel still looks a little messy right now but you're going to notice each one of these wires has a label on it what happened was my buddy lee helped me tone all these out and each one of these wires i've got toned and labeled so i know exactly where each one of these goes and then i'm going to bundle these up and once we get a little closer i'll show you how we're going to actually cut these off get all the keystones in all that good stuff i've got a rack that mounts in here i've got some sonos amps i love that this house has a good bit of technology and yet it's not overtaked right i don't have some crazy system that's going to be hard to use or hard to manage i'm using halo and their halo app for my lighting and lighting control i'm using sonos for my speakers and my volume i've got uh i'll show you in the future what i'm doing for because i don't have any of that equipment now but i've got ubiquity systems that i'm using for all of my internet throughout the whole house i'm going to use their dream machine but basically that's the stuff i wanted to show you i will mention one last thing you saw four speaker wires that look like 16 two wires back there and you're gonna notice i've got four windows in my master that all have a wire to them i'm gonna do motorized blinds in my master bedroom just on a switch not on an app all right guys final thoughts and let me wrap this up you know i was trying to be really thoughtful about my low voltage on the house so that i would meet my family's needs when i moved in but also knowing that gosh i've already got teenagers they're going to be out of the house in a short period of time that i'll be able to meet those future needs of an age and place kind of house but one final thought you know when it comes to technology we need to be really cautious that we don't do things that are hard to undo later you know for instance i'm in my master here and it wasn't that many years ago that i had a client that said matt you know i really love running my sound in my house off an ipod and so i want you to put ipod docks built into the wall and so we built one into the sheetrock in his master we built one into a stone wall in his kind of patio space in several other places in the house and literally he moved in and six months later apple went from that wide you know i figured what they call that the 12-pin connection something like that that real wide connection to the lightning connection and it was immediate like oh shoot you know i've got a brick in my wall now so that was something i really wanted to avoid and honestly that's one of the things that really drove me to doing a solution number one that i could do a lot of the work myself or if i hire someone great but it's understandable and so that's what i liked about the ubiquity networks system i think i can install most of that myself i really like that about sonos and that really pushed me to do that because it's pretty affordable i could grow the system as i had more money but it's also super intuitive super easy i think we're always going to be able to run things off our phone whether it's bluetooth or wi-fi or some one of those technologies but i really did want to put wires in enough locations especially as inexpensive as it was i used two boxes of cat6 wire i bought way too much coax because i only ran it in three places and that's really the only low voltage cost i had besides a inexpensive on-cue panel anyways i'll put a link in the description for the some of the parts and materials i used and if you'd like me to get into more depth on the install for what i did with the sonos system or hooking up the ubiquiti networks uh the the wi-fi access points uh the camera system let me know i'm curious if that's something that that i should get into i don't often get into technology which changes i try to be as timeless as possible in my builds especially when it comes to structure insulation air sealing we've only got one good chance to do that but i think that there is a a case against not putting wiring in and saying oh everything's wireless because that's not entirely true and a lot of the wireless systems tend to be not super reliable they work sometimes they don't always work so knowing that i've got a cable in the wall which is really the best technology we have today and uh you know cat5 we used for years now we're on cat6 there is another cable beyond that i didn't think it was worth going up to that anyways guys i really appreciate your time i'll put a link to some of the parts and materials big thanks to voltex for donating this system for my house i was really excited about that i'll show you more of this on the final but if you're not currently a subscriber guys hit that subscribe button we've got new content every tuesday and every friday follow me on twitter instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 176,304

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: IBzanvRn2Hc

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021