Prewiring in new construction: Advice
 

This is a tough topic to search for, so I hope I'm not being too redundant...

I'm building a house this year (July), and I want to make sure I have all my bases covered as far as prewiring. If you were building a house, what would be essential to you? My preliminary plans include:

1) Prewiring the living room for basic home theater and high-end audio. (Down the line, I'll wire the unfinished basement for my true home theater.)

2) Prewiring the bedroom for stereo sound.

3) Prewiring for rooftop FM antenna.

What else would you do? I've been without cable for a long time and have never ventured into the satellite arena. Which would you go for, and what prewiring would you do for it?

Do you plan on having speakers in EVERY ROOM? That would be pretty neat to hook up to a high end receiver. Thus, one receiver could control sound in any room. Not sure though.....

I just have my family room wired for Home Theatre....that's it. It was easy since I just went through my basement

I'd wire the whole house for networking too.

Yeah, good idea....I had to run a cable from my XBOX to my PC....that really sucked, but it wasn't THAT bad.

I'm building/restoring a big old place right now and have run tubing into multiple locations in every room so if down the line I want to put in something I don't forsee now I can snake cables through the tubes. My situation is somewhat different, the house is stone, but I wanted to be prepared for the future even though I believe we will be going wireless.

These are excellent considerations. Yes, I want to enable multi-room capabilities from one receiver, but I'm limiting that to the bedroom and maybe the kitchen.

Keep 'em comin'...

If you're at least wired for networking to each room you'll have that expansion ability in every room. Running a couple sets of networking cable would also let you send analog signals to the rooms if you didn't want to have to get other devices like computers involved in distributing the sound.

Good point. Thanks!

You might want to get some heavier gauge wire than typical network wire if you're intending to send analog, just to keep the loss down. Make sure it's well shielded too.

Don't forget a PVC pipe from the attic to the basement for future needs. It's the one thing I didn't think of :(.

We have a 1500 sq ft townhouse. I ran about 3000 feet of Cat5e, RG6, and speaker wire :).

I ran 4 lines of RG6 to each room and two lines of Cat5E to each room. I also ran a RG6 line from the attic. My Cat 5E lines went to my office and the RG6 lines went to my media center in the basement.

After doing my theater my only advice is this, run more cable length and type than you think you need to more places than you think you need. Take digital pictures of where the cable is buried if you can for future reference.

some good links and guides here:
Structured cabling

Cabling FAQ:
FAQ

and some good guides at Smarthome.com

Just don't use 24 gauge wire for your surrounds. A friend of mine who finished out a HT room did this. I guess his builder figured wire is wire.

has anyone else used CAT-5 as speaker cables? I did this in my living room, because I had a huge spool of cat5 to use up... used the striped wires and solid wires, as positive/negative... worked great, had this for a few years. Is this considered a no-no, or does anyone know?