New buildout...what cables to pull?

[Gunnar]

I am helping a friend determine where to locate his A/V equipment in his new place that is under construction right now (drywall not up and floors not in yet). The original plan was for a media closet containing all of the equipment. Unfortunately the TV will be located roughly 40' from that point and the reviews on 50' HDMI cables being able to handle future HD formats (1080p at 60Hz and above) have been poor at best. The thought now is to utilize the space behind the TV wall (dead space under the stairs that was already planned on being built into a small closet) for the living room A/V equipment (cable box & DVD player) and then run the necessary cables back to the media closet where the distributed audio (and potentially video) system will reside. The question is what cables should be run from the closet below the stairs to the media closet (about 40 foot run) to try to anticipate future needs. My friend and his wife won't be very demanding users but they want to have it wired for more demanding future owners.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[dorokusai]

Why not run some 2-3" PVC between those locations? Or a couple smaller runs of a flexible tubing....to keep video cables away from speaker cables for example. I would suggest pulling some CAT5 to every phone and cable jack as well.

Mark
Polk Audio CS

 

[highfihoney]

If it were me i'd have every last outlet in my media room wired with 20 amp service,if it's done durring the build the added cost shouldnt be more than $50an outlet,no worries later on.

 

[jbs]

Conduit is definitely the answer

I don't *think* this counts as a cross-post, but full disclosure I'm copying a lot of what I wrote in a post on the Control4 forums in a thread on pre-wiring a house at the c4forums.com discussion boards (can't post a link as I'm an audiophyte

We completed a new construction house a few months ago, with an AV closet in the basement that has ~8 video and audio sources distributed around the house via component, network cabling and speaker wire. To the main television locations where I could see potentially upgrading in the future to HDMI I ran conduit to allow for swapping out cables at some point. I also ran conduit to 4 locations where I wanted to have security cameras, since I felt like that's a technology likely to change it's transmission format in the coming years (especially as IP cameras become more affordable).

I would absolutely concur that conduit is the answer. I used a combination of 3/4" and 1" conduit, flexible plastic variety. I bought it from an EXCELLENT site called Mcmaster-Carr. They are an industrial supply company with a website at mcmaster.com, and I suspect half the people on these boards will love them just as much as I do. You search their site for conduit (or anything else for that matter) and they come back with dozens or hundreds of options, neatly organized in a hierarchy. You select next by material, size, length, or whatever, and it constantly narrows down your options till you find exactly what you need.

Flexible is much easier to install than rigid, and I think it's easier to fish through later. I intended to leave pullstring in the conduit but the electrician accidentally cut most of it when he was installing it. If you can't push a fishtape through, the other thing that worked very well for me on a couple of particularly long, twisted conduit pathways was to put a shopvac on one end which I attached to a remote control power outlet. I then climbed up to the other end of the conduit in the attic and fed through a small twist of paper towel with a thin nylon string attached to it. This sucked the string all the way through in a matter of seconds. I then pulled a stronger line through with the string and my cables through with the stronger twine. Oh, and I attached another piece of the stronger line to the cables so I can still pull more through if I need to. The vacuum trick seems to work quite well, as long as you're using an airtight conduit such as the continuous plastic ones I used.