Home Automation & Audio Video Design

Posted April 30, 2009 13:49 by Robert

Tags: pluseworx, audio video, home automation

We are excited to be working with Gerry Lynch at System 7 (http://www.sevenhomes.com/) for the Audio Video & Home Automation part of our project. The approach we have taken for AV and lighting control is to make sure that we cover all of our current and future needs, while at the same time trying to minimize the use of proprietary systems and homeruns. Because every system that we have picked is based on open standards, they can be linked up and controlled together at a later time.

For audio, we pre-wired most rooms for in-ceiling or in-wall speakers, with the rooms that are going to be live now getting cutout templates for the sheetrock. The rooms that we may bring online later have a coiled wire in the ceiling that we will mark. Instead of being wired to in-room controls, the speakers are terminated somewhere nearby for an open source system such Sonos, which can be controlled from a computer, handheld remote or even an iPhone app. The distributed Sonos players then link up via the home network rather than having to be set-up as a homerun and are controlled wirelessly.  This way you can access your entire digital music collection and sources from any room.

For video, each current or future television location got an RG6 cable and a CAT6 cable for data. CAT6 is a bit more expensive than 5 or 5E, but has the best data capacity. If the TV location was going to be on a wall, we put several CAT5 wires from the base of the wall up to where the TV would be mounted as well as component video cable to give us options. These are just the raw uncapped cables, we will only need to pay to hook-up what we use. CAT5 has the advantage of being phone, data or even HDMI when it has the right attachments and is relatively inexpensive.  The phone locations were also done using CAT5 next to each bed, with the cable and data across from the bed. If need be, they could be switched to data for a VOIP phone such as Vonage.

For lighting control, we followed Gerry’s recommendation for a system called Pulseworx. Unlike more expensive systems such as Lutron Homeworks,  which require you to homerun all of your power lines, Pluseworx works by replacing  traditional switches with a similar style switch that is also able to send data across your existing power lines though a technology called UPB.  These new switches (http://www.pulseworx.com/DimmersSwitches_.htm) can be found and controlled by a master switch (http://www.pulseworx.com/KPCW-6_.htm) and the whole thing can even be programmed from your PC or through open source third party automation controls.  The real advantage of this strategy is that it does not requiring wiring any differently and also allows you to make incremental changes on a switch by switch basis, which eliminates a large upfront investment . You can start with a few locations and add on as you go. The only thing we did differently was to locate a few sets of switches where we would have had a huge switch box into a nearby closet (ie Kitchen). We will then put those switches “on the network” and use a single control switch in the Kitchen to control those lights.

We have given ourselves a lot of flexibility with respect to “future proofing” without having to make any significant upfront investments. It’s really worth spending the time with someone like System 7 to get at least the design portion of your low voltage/ AV wiring done correctly, even if you don’t have the current budget for whole house audio or automation.  We also prewired a few locations for touchscreen controls which today are very expensive, but over time will likely become much more reasonable.

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