The customer initially balked at a $10,000 wiring bill, but Baumann says the rainy day runs have already paid off. “He had a room where he said he didn’t need a computer or video feed, but he came back to us later and said his daughter was coming to visit and she wanted a TV in her room. So they came in handy.” So did the extra Cat 5 run in the bedroom. The wife’s study and the master bedroom shared a thermostat in the original plans, but after a cold winter they realized they needed separate thermostats to handle two thermally different rooms. “We had an additional Cat 5 wire running to the touchpanel that we could run to the thermostat,” he says.
Any home theater begs for extra wiring because homeowners always have to be prepared for the next big thing—along with a core of smaller ones. In this theater, Bauman ran 10 to 15 extra runs of Cat 5 “just in case” and ended up using nearly every one. The husband is a sports fan, so much so that he watches the big football game each week on a 110-inch projection screen and reserves the two smaller Fujitsu 55-inch plasmas for other games. When his wife or grandkids want to join him and view a cooking show or play Xbox, they can plug in wireless headphones—a late add made possible by Cat 5—and tune in their own audio.
The whole-house RG6 network enables every room with a TV to view a DVD without having a player in the room. A 400-disc Sony DVD changer in the main equipment room can be accessed from remote Crestron panels and fed through local TVs. “If you don’t have distributed video,” says Baumann, “the only way you have access to 400 discs is if a player is sitting under your TV and you go retrieve a disc.”
The key to success on this project, Baumann says, was weekly meetings to inform all subcontractors what the others were doing—a huge benefit when unforeseen issues arose. Because the property was built to commercial standards, it included features not required in residential installations, for instance, loudspeakers had to have back boxes for fire ratings. “The boxes are a lot bigger than the speakers, so if you have an 8-inch hole it needs a 16-inch pathway because of the side wings that hold it in the ceiling,” Baumann says. “If you didn’t know beforehand you’d have to cut into drywall, which you never want to have to do. It pays on any project to have all the subs talking so there’s open communication.”—Rebecca Day specializes in writing about home electronics. She can be reached at customhomerd@aol.com.
