Ideas of costs?

[tincan]

I am currently purchasing an old house that needs most of it refurbishing (new kitchen, bathroom ETC). My question is as all the plasterwork needs re doing I was thinking of installing some form of home networking solution. Does anyone one have a rough idea of the costs involved in (A) getting someone to install such a system (B) installing one myself? Brother in-law is a qualified electrician. The house is a three-bedroom semi detached and I would ideally like some form of lighting scheme. Multi room audio/video in four possibly five zones. I have had a good look around on the web and have seen some interesting ideas. Any help or feedback greatly welcomed. Cheers

[noel-pilot]

have a look at automatedhome.co.uk a big yahoo group with lots of friendly people on there. spend some time searching the archives and you should get some ideas.

Im still a relative newbie at this myself and am in the major planning stages. As to costs you could spend anything from a thousand to hundreds of thousands of pounds to achieve what you want!

anything is possible even at the lower cheaper end of the market!!

[rectorydp]

Certainly you are right to contemplate doing all the wiring now. What you actually need will depend upon your solutions but for maximum flexibility you should wire all lights and switches back to a central point (consumer unit). You should also wire CAT5 to all the switches (separate conduit and should really be mains rated into the switch enclosure. The pink CAT5 sold by clipsal is mains rated)

I would suggest wiring all the rooms for CAT5e. CAT6 could be used but the wiring specification are very tight and generally not thought to be worth the effort. The general rule of thumb is to think of all the possible uses of CAT5 and install at least twice as much as you think you coul possibly need! Many people use CAT5 for all sorts of things other that just networking, eg IR, PIRs, relays, etc.

There is certainly no reason why you shouldn't do it yourself and there is a lot of information on the web.

As noel-pilot said, take as look at automatedhome. There is an enormous amount of information on the Yahoo group, the forum, the archives and the linked sites. The group is particularly focussed on those that want to do it themselves.

As noel-pilot also said, the range of costs is large depending upon your solution. I believe there is some discussion of the costs of getting someone to do the wiring on the forums. Many do it themselves though.

Good luck.

[tincan]

Thanks guy's I'll take a good look at that over the weekend and see what comes up. It's good to know that there are others out there doing the same thing so hopefully loads of knowledge and advice, Especially when it all goes wrong!

[vex]

For a basic starting price point.

My installers look at a ball park of £1500 installed for a basic 8 points of telephone and data over CAT5e and 8 TV + 1 Sky over Coax.

This can obviously go upwards and even down if you reduced the service points and did some of the work yourself.

Lighting is very subjective and you need to have a clear idea of what you want to do before it is priced because concepts and equipment can vary wildly.

automatedhome is a great and growing forum for this and I might even meet you there!

Chris

[tincan]

Once again thanks boys. This is really helping me out. Chris that sounds like a good price, good to get a starting point. I know it's hard to give an exact cost as each installation can vary greatly but this is good

[pianobaz]

I have bought a house and adding a side and rear extension. I have the opportunity to fllod the house with Cat5e. I was thinking 6 runs of Cat5 to certain rooms from a hub.

Would anyone recomend using CAT6 instead so as to become more 'future proof' and take advantage of the higher bandwidth.

Are there any disadvantages?

[rectorydp]

The advantage is that when properly installed CAT6 should work
with full-duplex Gigabit ethernet. However, it is my understanding that CAT6 installation depends on far more than just using CAT6 cable as if it were CAT5e cable. The installation standards for CAT6 are very high, and to actually achieve
CAT6 installation standard throughout is very difficult. The amount of "non-twisted wire" you're allowed at termination points is extremely small with CAT6. I believe there are also tight constraints on bend radii, etc.

See here http://www.expresscomputeronline.com...nology01.shtml for some of the issues.

Most of the advice I have seen is to stick with CAT5e unless you have a really critical requirement for CAT6. If you are getting it installed then it will probably be down to price. The installation costs are likely to be much higher for CAT6 that is properly installed.

BR
David

[vex]

Both Business and Personally, I would say there is no real adavantage to wiring in Cat6 over Cat5e.

The only real advantage will be more capacity (when the time comes) over your internal network and the chances are someon ewill have come out with a better compression / capacity system for Cat5e to compensate.

You still cant run full band UHF down it, only source (video and audio) level stuff.