[mythtv-users] New house - any advise?

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Tue Jan 16 18:12:39 UTC 2007


    Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 09:22:01 -0600
    From: matthew.garman at gmail.com

    Hopefully, someday I'll build my house from scratch.  When I do, I'm
    going to run a ton of Cat 6 (or whatever the latest generation of
    network cable is).  But, I'm going to put it all in *conduit*.  The
    intent is to make it easy if I ever need to pull more wire.

Run empty conduit, too.  And make sure you leave pullstrings in all of them.

When a conduit gets moderately full, it becomes next to impossible to
pull new cable through it due to friction and entanglement in what's
already there, even if there would have been plenty of space had that
one extra cable been run with all the others.  So you should plan to
either have rather oversize conduit, or do as much pulling as possible
in the same pull, or run empty conduit so you can repeat the pull 10
years later.  (Given a pair, you could do all the pulling at once in
#1, leaving #2 empty, and then, 10 years later, do all the pulling in
#2.  10 years after -that-, you can pull everything out of #1 (which
by now has 20-year-obsolete wiring in it) and pull a lot of fresh
stuff in #1 again.  That way, you're always pulling in empty conduit,
but you never have to rip out lots of active stuff to repull.)

(Granted, if all your runs are very short (a couple of rooms, with few
or no bends), you may not have as much of an issue with mostly-full
conduit, but it can surely happen.  You can always take some junk
cables, run them through a section, and then try to pull one more
cable through the mess and see how it goes; that'll tell you right
now whether you have a problem, rather than surprising you a few years
from now when all the walls are all closed up.)


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