Rewiring a house

[raven219]

Hoping this is the right forum for this question.

In the process of buying a new house and it has to be rewired. Is there anything I should be looking at doing to improve the electrical feeds to audio/video equipment.

Thanks

[JC74]

Stick a dedicated ring main in at you kit position, that's it.

Don't get sucked in to thinking that you need special plugs and earthing etc... its all snake oil!!

I would add, its worth having some sort of suppression/filter device to protect your kit but they don't come cheap.

[MoJo-chan]

As far as mains wiring goes, try to make sure you get all the details of what has been done. What socket is on what ring etc, so that if anything wants doing later you already have a complete plan to work from and aren't left guessing what is what. Think about upgrades too - do you want any sockets changed from single to double or extra ones put in? Sockets are better than trailing multi-sockets everywhere. It's cheaper and easier to do it now than later. In rooms where you might want a lot of additional cabling, it might be worth looking in to replacing the skirting board with the hollow kind that you can snap off and put cables behind.

Since new wire is being pulled, take the opportunity to have network and coax pulled as well. Maybe even speaker wire.

You might not want network and coax in every room, but it's well worth pulling it now you have this golden opportunity in case you ever do. Also, since cable is cheap, it's worth pulling two lots through, one as a backup.

Then you can have freeview/cable/satellite anywhere without messy new cable runs, decorating is much easier and as everything moves towards being networked you can have high speed LAN too. Ideal for a HTPC.

For the LAN stuff, use wallplates and get a cheap patch bay off eBay for the central hub point. Well, in fact LAN switches are so cheap now you could have more than one. 100Mb will do, gigabit is a luxury but nice. You can always upgrade later as long as you put CAT5e or CAT6 cable in.

For the coax, you will want one hub point (loft is the usual place) and a distribution booster amp. Again, no need to go for anything fancy or splash out on one that can supply every room because you can always upgrade later.