Planning and Designing your IP Home

What is an IP Home anyway? An IP Home is a home whose systems and products (entertainment, lighting, cameras, thermostats, etc…) are integrated to work seamlessly over a home network. These systems/products use the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as their glue. IP Homes typically contain a combination of both wired and wireless products. This all sounds very complicated, and it is, but if installed and configured correctly, for the end-user, this actually translates into simplicity and a lot of convenience – a richer experience.

Ground-zero for most electronic products are the custom electronics industry tradeshows like CEDIA, EHX, and CES, where Integrators/Installers go to learn and see the latest and greatest products and systems. Over the last 5 years, the reaction in our industry tradeshows has gone from – “IP what”? to “This is the future of digital entertainment and control in homes – and I have to have it”. IP is now the new buzz at these shows.

With so many electronic lifestyle products, including entertainment PCs and MACs now available for homes, how does one go about selecting and designing an IP Home? The key to this is research and/or finding a good ‘Integration company’ that understands and installs IP-Based systems. Investing in products that are not IP-Based today is like buying an extremely ripe fruit. It is no longer a question as to whether homes will have networks, or whether TVs will have Ethernet connections in the future. Many consumer products selling today have, or will soon have, Ethernet connections. And in the future, they all will. After making a significant investment in ‘electronic/computing products’, don’t you want these to interoperate seamlessly in your home? Unfortunately, without a professional’s help, even products that are IP-Based, don’t do this automatically.

So… how do we plan for and design an IP Home? The first thing that you need to establish is you budget and your priorities for the products that you want in your home. I tie these two together because I have concluded that no matter how much money you have, unless you have several million dollars to assign to your electronic systems (and some people do), you will probably have to make choices on what you want to spend your money on. These will be different family to family. For my family, because we enjoy music so much, it was multi-room audio. Although we enjoy watching movies a lot too, we knew that the multi-room audio system would get used the most. But let me tell you…. It was hard, because we wanted to do everything possible. Our budget kept climbing every week, until we finally got to the pain threshold. We then had to defer some things and reduce our budget in some categories in order to get what we wanted in our priority categories.

The good news about designing an IP Home is that if you plan ahead and you wire it properly, as per my earlier blog post, you don’t have to do it all at once. You can scale your electronic lifestyle, one system or product at a time.

The most common areas to consider as you plan are:
Multi-room Audio
- Standard Analog audio distribution – for background music (Good)
- High fidelity audio distribution (Better)
- IP-based audio distribution (Best)

Multi-room Video
- Traditional coax RF distribution (Good)
- Balanced-line video distribution (Better)
- IP-based video distribution (Best)

Home Theater(s)
- Combo rooms with a home theater system (Good)
- Controlled-light multi-purpose room (Better)
- Dedicated Home Theater room (Best)

Intercom
- Stand-alone Intercom System (Good)
- Integrated Phone/Intercom System (Better)
- Intercom System that uses your multi-room audio speakers (Best)

Lighting Control
- Power line or RF Lighting control system (Good) – For retrofit (Best)
- Wired lighting control system (Better)
- IP-controlled and wired lighting control system (Best)

Security System (including cameras)
- Wired or Wireless Security System (Good)
- Wired or Wireless Security System with Fire Protection (Better)
- IP-based Wired or Wireless Security System with Fire Protection (Best)

Automated shades and curtains
- Since there are no IP-Based shades available yet, you will have to control these through your lighting system or contact-relay controller

Climate Control (HVAC)
- This one is a touchy one. Although I love the idea of integrating everything in your home, if you are building a new home and you invest in a multi-zone HVAC system with high efficiencies, you should never have to control your thermostat remotely; unless you go on vacations a lot and want the ability to take your home out of temperature setback remotely. In our home, after the first 30 days of tweaking the temperatures and times, we haven’t found the need to touch the thermostats. However, if you have the need to remotely control your thermostat(s), and IP-Based thermostat like AprilAire is a great option.

Other (Pool controls, irrigation controls, fireplaces, fans, etc…)
- RS-232 controlled input/output (I/O) control products are good, but an IP-Based I/O control product is your best option. The products connected to these I/O products can be combined with each other or other products, via programming to accomplish some very convenient things like one button control of your theater (turn on your theater equipment, open curtains, mask the screen, dim the lights, select the right audio mode, turn on the projector or display, and start the movie).

Control System
- This will be your toughest or easiest decision, depending on whether you are being given a sales pitch without good data, or one with good data. Most people, given good data, will make the right decision for them. Of course, no matter which direction you want to take, always look for a system that is IP-Based, as it will offer you the most options, longer life, and most scalability and expandability.

Each of these product categories offers a lot of choices from many manufacturers in the Custom Electronics market. Sorting through all of these choices is not something that I recommend you take on alone. By working closely with a reputable and knowledgeable Integrator, you should be able to avoid the many products/systems in the market that are not ready for prime time and don’t work well, or don’t offer the performance that you desire, or won’t scalable or grow with you, or won’t meet your needs and expectations.

Now that IP is in vogue, some manufacturers are putting Ethernet connectors on their products, and then adjusting their brochures to claim that they are IP-Based, when in fact they are not. At best, some of these products give you simple control over some functions of their product, but that is a far cry from being designed using IP technology and web services from the ground, up. Your Integrator will know how to navigate these dangerous waters.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com


Herman Cardenas

Labeling and Certifying Your Cables

Proper Labeling – If there is one thing that my integrator and I would do all over again, it would be to certify and properly label all of the cables in my home, during the ‘wiring phase’. This would have saved us a tremendous amount of time (days) and money. I can’t even begin to tell you how much pain and time it cost us not having properly labeled and certified cables. My Integrator’s plan was to do this done from the very beginning, but the installer that he assigned to my job chose to label my cables with numbers and then create a reference table, which he kept to himself. Sometime after my house was dry walled, this installer got fired, and as retaliation, he chose to conveniently lose this table, leaving us back at square one. It also turned out that, although he originally put numbers on both ends of the cable, when he cut the cables to stuff them into their appropriate wall boxes, he did not label the cables again.

Recommendation – Since we know what each cable is intended for prior to wiring the project, and adequate label printers are available almost anywhere, starting as low as $29.00, the way to go is to label each cable in plain English: i.e. ‘Dining Room Amplifier’, ‘Living Room Touch Screen’, or ‘Patio Speakers’. This way, if a new installer is assigned to finish the job months later, there is no guessing involved. The label maker that I bought is made by Brothers. I bought it at Office Max and it cost me $39. I then ordered special ½” label tape that is designed for application on cables. When labeling equipment that is black, like power supplies or rack mounted equipment, we used white-on-black tape. For all other label needs, we used black-on-white. Now it is so easy to see what is connected to what, and if we want to make a change, there is no guessing or ringing out cables involved.

Certifying Your Cables – There are a couple of ways to certify your cables documented and undocumented. The first is to simply test all of your cables during the ‘wiring phase’ of the job. The second is to test them, then print out the results to serve as documentation for the integrator and the customer, that all cables have been tested and passed during that phase. Although it is not required, it wouldn’t hurt to test the cables again after drywall to insure that none of the cables were damaged by other contractors on the project. In many commercial projects, this is a requirement.

Many installers believe that a simple continuity test is sufficient. It is not. That was OK for telephone, but now that we are installing devices that require significant bandwidth from your network, like IP Audio and IP Video, it is extremely important that these cables are terminated properly and that their integrity is intact, so that you can maximum performance from your network.

The difference between a reliable system and one that is plagued with problems is usually in the wiring and termination. My installer was able to demonstrate to me that a bad cable that passes the ‘network’ test with a simply continuity cable tester, can fail when tested with a proper network cable tester.

Recommendation – Test all cables during the ‘wiring phase’ of your project, before drywall and consider testing them again after drywall, if budget allows. Printing the test results of all of the cables is a great option, and may even be required on some projects.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you and learn what other parts of my ‘building an IP home’ experience would be helpful to you: hermansblog@netstreams.com.

Wiring for an IP Home

When my wife and I began to plan our new home 3 years ago, I was determined to wire it for everything under the sun. Heading up a company that was leading the custom electronics market into the next era of technology and applications, put a significant self-imposed burden on me. Mostly because I felt that instead of keeping up with the Jetsons, it was my responsibility to ‘be’ the Jetsons.

When I started the research process, my head was filled with questions, and for awhile it seemed that the more I researched, the more questions I would generate. What cables, standards and technologies would I use in our new IP home – Coax, CAT5e, fiber, Ethernet, wireless or power line technology? And what connections would I use for my displays – HDMI, DVI, Component or other? What format would I use for streaming audio around the home – MP-3, AAC, WMA, or WAV? Whose products would I use to compliment NetStreams’ multi-room audio/video/control products, for things like lighting, cameras, thermostats, theater products, etc…? I did know one thing, and that was that I did not want to narrow down product decisions three years before our home was to be completed because of the extremely fast pace of which technology and products change in our market. I did not want to wire my home exclusively or specific to any manufacturer’s products, because I wanted our infrastructure to address the many products available at the time my home was completed in the future, and the many products coming in the future beyond that point in time. These decisions would involve a lot of research because many of these standards were still under development or just coming to the market, and were unproven.

Months later I reached my conclusion and decision, and almost three years later, it has proven to have been the right one. What I determined after the many months of research was that there was no ‘one single standard’ that would address all of my needs. Here is what I learned:

The CEA 802.3 standard (Ethernet) is the most widely used standard, internationally, for both residential and commercial computer networks, control and now audio and video distribution. CAT5e is the most widely used cable for computer networks, control, telephone, professional video distribution, and more. I learned that this 20+ year old standard is solid and provides us with the right infrastructure for current and future products. The CEA 802.3 standard suggests “home runs” from each outlet. A “home run” is a direct run of cable from the “head-end” location (the location where telephone, cable/satellite and home network cables are originated inside the home) to one or more locations in each room. Using this standard would allow me to later choose from the myriad of products and technologies available for distribution of our video, while also providing us with the cables needed for our home network and telephone needs, in each room.

OK, one decision made…. CAT5e everywhere.

Much like electricity is distributed from a central panel(s) to locations around the home, and the electricity is fed to these panels from the meter box, where the power company connects their services to, telephone, home network, cable, and satellite service providers connect to boxes outside of your home known as ‘demarcation points’ and their services are then extended to the panels where they are distributed around your home. This wiring infrastructure is called “structured wring”.

The most widely used cable for structured wiring is called a “2x2 ”, which is a bundled cable with four cables inside; two RG-6 (coax) cables used for cable/satellite television or analog camera distribution, and two CAT5e cables, used for telephone, home network, video distribution and more. The standard for structured wiring cable is the TIA/EIA 568. Although this standard covers a good portion of my infrastructure needs, I learned that implementing only this standard would not be enough, because this standard did not address the needs of our lighting control system, our multi-room audio and video system, our home control system, our security system, our IP cameras, our thermostats, or home theater. It is mostly designed for distributing home network, cable/satellite television and telephone. However, if I want to distribute high definition television signals from a central location to all of our rooms, or want to centralize my three satellite boxes so that I don’t have to add a box per television set in our home, which in our case is 8-10 TVs, traditional structured wiring solutions can’t help me. This typical requires a professionally designed system and a video matrix switch.

So that I don’t turn this blog post into a book, I’ll now summarize what I did for my wiring. Because I believe that in the future most products will be IP-based or IP-controlled, I made sure to run CAT 5e almost everywhere that I anticipated installing a product or system.

Audio Distribution: For our multi-room audio needs, I chose to use the CEA 2030 standard, as I found this to be the most flexible and best standard. This standard requires a CAT5e cable plus a 4-conductor cable (#16 or #14 gauge wires) from the head-end audio/video location to each keypad, then looped up to the speakers. This can be accomplished with two separate cables or a Siamese cable that is a cable that offers both the CAT5e and 4-conductors in one jacket, making it easier and cheaper to install. I found that other standards address the distribution of analog audio or digital audio, but not both; and I found no other standard that addressed the requirements of an IP-Based audio distribution system. The CEA2030 addresses the needs of analog, digital and IP-Based audio distribution systems. Because my company is involved in the development of technology for IP speakers, I knew that having a CAT5e available at the speaker for network connectivity, along with the 4-conductors for power was critical.

Video Distribution: Because I wanted to distribute high definition video signals around my home from centrally-located satellite boxes, so we can access and view content from any video source, (including our TIVO), from any room in the home, I found that we could not use the typical coax distribution in my GE Security structured wiring panel. Structured wiring panels typically use traditional radio frequency (RF) amplifiers and splitters for its video distribution. These do not distribute high definition signals from the new HD sources such as BluRay or HD-DVD, nor do they distribute Dolby Digital, DTS, or other similar audio effects. However we still ran 2x2 cables from the structured wiring panel to each TV location in the home, and in addition ran CAT5e cables from each location to my equipment rack. This CAT5e would be later connected to a NetStreams Panorama video distribution system for distribution of our standard and high definition video signals from our satellite boxes and our centralized BluRay player around the home. More on this product line on a future post.

Telephone / Computer Network: This one was the simplest of all of the wiring standards to implement. Since a 2x2 cable contains two CAT5e cables, by running a 2x2 home run to each location that I wanted Ethernet and/or telephone, I was able to achieve both. And in locations where I did not need telephone, I could assign the two CAT5e to our home network.

Lighting Control: Wiring for lighting control was a little different because it forced me to decide, in advance, on the type of lighting system that I was going to use and the manufacturer. The reason for this is that lighting devices fall into two general categories: a) dimmer/relay switches that are installed at the traditional switch location and then networked through CAT5e, RF (wireless), or power lines, and b) dimmer/relay modules that are installed in one or more central locations somewhere in the home. Each of these methods has its own requirements, costs, and benefits. After weighting all of these heavily and looking at many different products, I decided to use the Lutron HomeWorks products. This system required us to run a shielded CAT5e cable from each keypad location back to multiple panels that would house our Lutron dimmer and relay modules and processors. The shielded cable can be Class II (CL-2) in-wall rated cable, but Class III (CL-3) burial grade – is recommended. These cables are comprised of a pair of 18 gauge wires for power and pair of 22 gauge shielded wires with a drain ground for communications.

Other: The above wiring schemes covered the majority of the needs of our IP home, but there were other subsystems and products to think about and each of these carried its own wiring needs: Security system, Intercom, Cameras, Thermostats, Drapes/shades, Pool controls, Garage door openers, Irrigation system, Outdoor lighting and more. If you are integrating these products with your whole house control system, the wiring requirements are different than when these systems are installed ‘stand-alone’.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you and learn what other parts of my ‘building an IP home’ experience would be helpful to you: info@netstreams.com.