I'm all 'Wired' up

After another week of traveling, I came home from Denver yesterday with goals to start and finish wiring what I could of the apartment. I've bought a 500 ft. roll of RG6 wire for cable television wiring and a 500 ft. roll of loudspeaker wire. Wiring is quite simple, but since I had a bit of a master plan, it made it a bit more time consuming.

I've decided that everything should be concealed so I had to do some drilling through a few beams to run some cables. As well, my philosophy is the more cable outlets, the better. With that said, I'm running two stereo pairs of loudspeaker wiring and three RG6 cables in the bedroom (thus, 3 cable and two loudspeaker jacks). The loudspeakers will be 'home run' to the living room, where they can get a feed off of a receiver with multiple room outputs. The RG6 will be home run to the foyer ceiling where there will be a splitter box distributing the signal.



The smart thing I'm thinking about here is future wiring. I need to assume that my cable TV won't always come in from the facade as it is now (especially with the upcoming roof project our building is going to be going through). Thus, I've bought a combiner so I can run one wire from the dumbwaiter shaft to the foyer and the existing to the foyer as well. Thus if the wiring ever changes, I'm prepared and won't have to open up the ceiling much or completely rewire. These splitters/combiners are great devices and I recommend them to anyone who is wiring their place up (http://www.smarthome.com/7810.html). Once the signal is combined, out it goes via a 6-channel splitter (http://www.smarthome.com/7810C6.html).

The hardest work in all this was to tie together the loudspeaker wiring so I could have a stereo pair. I found the best method was to actually hang the wire out the window 6 stories in length and then twist the wire pairs (its not shielded) and tie it with zip ties. A bit of a process, but it seems to work. I'll have to mark up all my drawings with this wiring now for future reference.