PHASE #12 of Home Remodeling Project
Adding electrical, data, and video wiring...

[On to Phase 13]

This phase involved much thought, sweat, and some pure geekness to complete. The following conventions were used to complete the electrical for the house AND pass the follow on inspection (which of all inspections done was the most critical).

Room Outlets: 12 1/2 inches above the floor and 6 feet apart from each other. The code states that no matter where in the room you are you should be no more than 6 feet away from an outlet. I just placed outlets 6 feet apart from each other all the way around the room starting where I thought each outlet would actually satisfy something placed near it (nightstand, desk, etc.) rather than randomly placing them as any electrician would do (note very few electricians are geeks). Also, each room was supplied by its own electrical circuit (either 15 or 20 AMP). Since I connected these with 12 gauge wire -- I can run either size circuit (a good option of have). Lastly, I used 12/3 to connect all outlets in the room. 12/3 pulls easier through the walls and saves your knuckles (used a 1 inch drill bit to allow for additional wires and a heavy duty drill). A quick note about a drill. Getting a serious drill saved me countless hours - so by an expensive one as the cheap ones just don't have the torque to handle multiple studs. It is also better to have a larger hole than just the right size as you may well need to pull something else through that same hole. 12/3 also allows you to run wire from the last outlet to the switch for the room. By doing this, you can selectively wire each outlet in the room to work in one of three ways:

• A traditional outlet
• A fully switched outlet
• Both a traditional and a switched outlet (by breaking off the connecting steel tab on the back side of the outlet - this is exactly what this tab is meant for in case you didn't know)

It is useful to be consistent in your wiring of each room! For example, I ran the supply line up to the furthest outlet from the switch in each room. From there, I daisy chained each outlet from there all the way back to the switch where you enter the room. In each room, I therefore had a double switch located right next to the door handle. In each case, the switch closest to the door knob would be the overhead light and the farthest switch would be to any switched outlets that I had activated. Note a 15 AMP circuit should supply power for either 8 outlets or 16 lights. 20 AMP circuits can supply power for up to 16 outlets or 32 lights. When pulling the wire, go ahead and leave a good 8-9 inches of wire hanging out of the outlet. It is a huge time saver to strip the insulation off before you feed the wire into the box. If you don't do it right then, you will dred this task later.

Bathroom Outlets: Each bathroom outlet must be Ground Fault Interrupter (GFI) type and this house wired each bathroom to its own circuit. The code states that all GFI outlets must be connected together and not be part of any other circuit. I wired each bathroom to its own circuit. In this way, anything connected in one bathroom does not impact anything running in another bathroom. I considered worst case -- my daughter running a curling iron and hair dryer in one bathroom and my wife doing something similar in another. This would trip any circuit that connected all these bathrooms together.

Window Outlets: An interesting option for those building colonial homes or country homes is to allow for a low power light to be plugged in next to or just below each window. If you drive through some residential neighborhoods you will see such lights and think how neat. Problem is, every one of these lights is NORMALLY just plugged in an ordinary outlet or is battery operated rather than centrally controlled. I like the idea of tying them all together and then placing them on a timer circuit which is controlled near the main circuit breaker. In the end it is very little extra wire to do this and it just makes sense to not have to worry about turning them all on or off. It is little things like this that give a house an extra quality that goes just a little beyond the norm.

Lights: I went overboard on the lights as well... Each bedroom has switched outlets, an overhead light, switched closet light. The closet lights can all be lit or indicator type switches that show you that you've turned on the closet light even if the door is closed. To do this, you MUST have an electrical supply wired to the switch or have at least 14/3 pulled between the closet light and the switch so think ahead! I also wired these lights together but they are on separate circuits from the outlets. In this way, if one trips the breaker on the outlets, the lights will still work and vice versa. Another consideration I made is that no matter where you are in the house you are always close to lights that will guide your way to possible destinations. So as you walk in or out of every room the house, there will be light switches that will allow you to light your way (which every way you decide to go) as well as shut off the lights you are leaving from. It sounds like common sense but not all electricians think this way. When you get to your destination, you can also shut off the light you required to get where you are -- no back tracking necessary. Thus their are several 3 and 4 way switches in the house that permit these combinations. All switches were 43 inches off the floor and used 14/3 wire.

I thought ahead when I installed boxes for the lights in bedrooms to allow future ceiling fans to be installed later if I so desired. Ceiling fans require a special box that is specially attached to the rafter for added strength and support. Note that the box must say "ceiling fan" for this to work. You can't just get a really rigid box and somehow make this work. Since it is only about $15 for each box just do it right even though at the time it seems like overkill. Also, you must run at least 14/3 between the switch and the light box and it is a good idea the the switch box allow for at two switches to control the ceiling fan - one for the fan and one for the light or just one extra switch if you plan to use a combination switch. In my case, I used a three switch box in rooms I knew for sure would have a ceiling fan. The others I just used a dual switch box thinking that if one wanted to upgrade the light to a ceiling fan, all one would have to do is buy a combination switch that could control both the light and the fan. Note that some ceiling fans may need a 20 amp circuit available - most do not, but if you are planning on multiple ceiling fans (or the possibility of several of them) change your loading of light circuits to adjust for this. For example, instead of 16 lights on a 15 amp circuit you should only put a maximum of 8 lights (that could also be ceiling fans). Similarly if you can have 32 lights on a 20 amp circuit you should only allow for a maximum of 16 lights. If you don't do this, you could get flicker in lights when you run multiple ceiling fans. Flicker is a sign of overloading on light circuits. My motto is ALWAYS, ALWAYS over design your circuits (use heavier wire, outlets, and switches than you need) and you won't have to worry about melting down your wire - essentially the circuit breaker will blow before anything in the walls does.

When electricians wire your house they use whatever is cheapest. If a geek wires your house, they will use the best deep outlets, the heaviest gage switches, the best most durable switch plates, and the best wire nuts. The average person armed with good information is at least as good as an average electrician when it comes to wiring an addition. So, don't skimp and do it right. One could argue that once the walls are covered, it is all academic. However, I just sleep sounder knowing that whatever someone decides to plug into into the outlets, predictable behavior will rule - no surprises.

Laundry: The new code requires 10/3 to be run for dryer (but electrical dryer is optional) which I found out the hard way! Ended up having to pull new wire which was a pain. The only thing I did not do, which I probably should have was run copper tubing to the dryer location for future gas dryer. But there is an electrical outlet for both.

Data/Video: All these wires are pulled down to a large board that I hung in the basement. Here the phone & cable company wire is located to simplify connections to the rest of the house. The grand plan is to purchase a residential gateway and connect all Ethernet outlets to this box. This will allow one to plug in a laptop or computer to any outlet in the house and then gain access to printers and the Internet. I've also a personal web site that I can easily run from this location as well. One interesting thing I also did is run data wires to all appliances in the home. So the furnace, washer/dryer, etc. all were wired for data outlets. I'd recommend pulling at least two cat 5 wires to each appliance -- you never know... This actually saved me, as I forgot to run the low voltage wire between the furnace and the condenser outside. Luckily, I had cat 5 wire near the furnace and used some of that for this connectivity. So if you have spare time run extra wires between the furnaces. It could save you in the future.

Tools Used:

	High Leverage Side Cutters: Great all purpose electrical tool. Its insulated, can cut a wide rage of wire or strip insulation and is my personal favorite (at least 9" long)		Utility Knife: Extremely versatile and dependable. A sharp blade can easily cut insulation.		Insulated Screw Drivers: Great for electrical and general purpose use. If you break them, you can bring them back for a free replacement.
	Wood Drill Set: Best for drilling through all types of wood surfaces. Best blade I find to be is 1" for running electrical, data, and video wiring. All you need is 3/4" and 1" - about 1 for every 3 rooms as they wear out fast.		Electric Drill: The best way to bore holes to pull wire through is to use an electric drill. Cordless drills are great and all but repeated heavy drilling is tough on batteries (3/8" is standard) - I prefer Bosch. (last longer and have the torque to bore through toughest, thickest, wood)

The Actual Work:

Here you can see a wad of wires being pulled up from the basement. Each room in the house got two outlets each outlet consist of 2 category 5 cables and one quad shielded RG6 coaxial cable. Also ran additional outlets to the furnace on the third floor and laundry machines on the second floor. In all, about 2000 feet of category 5 wire and 1000 feet of RG6 was pulled around the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Significant care was taken so that these wires were at least 3 feet away from electrical wires. In cases where these wires had to cross electrical wires they always met at 90 degree angles to cut down on inducing AC noise into data wires (all of which were unshielded).

On the left you can see the wad of wires that got pulled up from the basement. This location was separate from the location where the electrical wires were pulled (shown on the right). I used one location to pull down all wires from the 2nd and 3rd floors -- the picture on the right shows but 5 of the eventual 16 circuits that were pulled.

Here you can see the 90 degree intersections between data and video wires in the background and electrical wires in the foreground.

Special Thanks goes out to those who also helped but that I don't have photos of -- they are in no particular order:

Ray Gratke (good friend from work who also helped tremendously)

Peter Bruss (neighbor that helped with much of the data wire pulling)

Tim Quinlan (good friend from work that really got me started with wiring and showed me much of what I used to complete this phase)

Nathan Stumme (Cozen who lives in Duluth and provided a good day's worth of work -- motivated me to complete many odds and ends)

Al Bahlmann (father who helped me ready for the first inspection it was very close as we completed last run as the guy showed up)

[On to Phase 13]

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