I hope you enjoy it, I am enjoying creating it.

I initially installed ~50mm waste pipe in the eves as conduit with draw strings added using a vacuum cleaner sucking a rag with the string through the pipe.  However while I had access to the eves it was easier to run the cables directly into the eves between Node-I and the bedrooms. 

Conduit in eves on second floor, cables overlaid

The conduit may be useful for adding more cables in the future as the eves are now filled with insulation and sealed.  So conduit may be useful here.

Conduit now sealed behind the wall

Where I used conduit to bring the Idranet cable to a single patress box, frustratingly I found the lips & edges within the conduit inspection elbow prevented easy installation of the cable, the inspection cover had to come off and the cables coaxed around the corner.

Conduit to carry Idranet cable to single patress box for an Idratek DRB

Plaster drying over freshly installed conduit showing path to door sensor from double patress

All the cables to existing light switches are run in 20mm round conduit.  Conduit was also run from floor to back-box in case of some future need in some of the bedrooms.  This turned out to be useful as the second relay within the MFP in the bedrooms will be used to control the heating actuator, so cable was run through this conduit at a later date in the installation.  A plus for conduit.

In this room I ran the door sensor cable as a horizontal T in conduit from the main drop.  This was a mistake as it was extremely difficult to pull the cable once fitted with a reed-switch back into the door frame.  Vertical drops with a loop across the ceiling to the back-box conduit were used after this; once the reed switch was fitted the slack could be much more easily pushed into the void.
Given that I did not find the joints and fittings that are possible with round conduit beneficial I would use oval conduit, if any, in the future.

Conduit in the floors was very difficult to install as construction was joist (50mm gap) wall (5mm gap) joist, so there was little room for error in aligning the relatively large and rigid pipe.

Conduit crossing floor joists from adjacent room

Installation of the conduit obviously required  pulling up floor boards and soon after this most of the cables went in.  When I returned to install some more cables for the porch area – which I had originally over looked – the conduit was effectively full and another route had to be found.  As only one board had to come up along the path across the joists it would have been easier to just pull the board up and drill a series of holes and then thread the cables through each one.

So in my experience conduit has been useful in that it has allowed extra cables to be run in some places after walls were sealed.  However it was a pig to bury, especially as it was round and I discovered that the capacity of a conduit is much less than the total area of a pipe as teh cables bend and snake and twist as they are installed.  I looked up some numbers on conduit capacity and IIRC in commercial settings it is as low as 40% of the conduit area!

My learning points from this are:

• Plan better and get the cable schedule right first time.
• Weigh the cost of possibly saving disruption in the future with the certainty of additional cost to bury and route conduit. 
• Ony use oval conduit in walls.

this is about as pleasant as a vet helping a cow to birth

as immortalised by James Herriot’s books.  So with that thought firmly in mind here are some more pics as the installation progresses to the first floor.

Our Neural Home is a 3 storey building, so one of the tasks in the design stage was working out routes for the cables between floors that did not conflict with other services.  I re-used an old pipe box section as the main route between 1st & 2nd floors for all ELV cables.  A separate route for mains cables was created within the studwork on the opposite wall.  This boxing was ideally situated with good horizontal alignment between Node-0 and Node-I and this route.

 Prior to completion the cables were cable-tied together to help support them.  The cavity as it entered the floor above was stuffed with glass wool for fire and smoke protection.  I had not thought about this at first but several tradesmen advised me to do this.  Unfortunately this has the consequence of hampering further addition of cables but given the frequency with which this is likely to happen is a precaution worth taking.  I will also seal other cavities and routes I created between rooms with fire retardant foam.

The corner of the old kitchen that is destined to become Node-0. 

Cables dropped into the space where Node) will be to guage length

I dropped these cables through the ceiling early to get an idea of how much spare cable I should leave.  Having spoken to a few people I underestimated for these early data cables.  I allowed plenty for them to terminate in a high mounted patch panel, but there isn’t sufficient to allow the patch panel to be worked on at work-surface level, so all the punching down will have to happen on a shelf up a ladder – not so convenient.

I have tinkered with some parts of the installation for a while but it is now in full-swing.  The installation of the infrastructure is in two main phases: upstairs and downstairs which aligns with the other works in the house.  However as the house has a solid ground floor all the downstairs cables have to go into the upstairs floor cavity, so while the upstairs is progressing, I won’t be able to finally put the floor (or floor coverings) down until everything is finished down stairs too.  I am working top down trying to work ahead of the builders as they tackle the structure of the building putting insulation in, sorting out the rot etc. 

The pictures show the transformation of one of the 2nd floor bedrooms, first ripping out the existing ceiling so that new SuperQuilt insulation could be installed.

Loft room originally

The ceiling was pulled down to allow insulation to be installed

The picture below shows the pod I had built that Idranet (yellow), door and window sensor (white) and light switch (grey) cables are routed to.  This will eventually house an MFP or DFP.  I am using the coloured band cable- labelling scheme but while it is effective it is slow to label each cable this way and laborious to check what a cable is for (what was that colour code again?)

Space-age insulation plus a DFP pod

Node-I (idratek) was the first to be cabled.  It started life as an airing cupboard.

The airing cupboard that will become Node-I

As the bedrooms were cabled, the other ends were dropped into the region Node-I would take (it got very dusty up there!)

The first cables being dropped into Node-I are visble through the doorway

As the dormer was built I had to retrieve all these into the loft to protect them

New dormer, happy builder, cables safe in the loft

I initially installed ~50mm waste pipe in the eves as conduit with draw strings added using a vacuum cleaner sucking a rag with the string through the pipe.  However while I have access to the eves it has been easier to run the cables directly into the eves between Node-I and the bedrooms. 

Conduit installed, but un-used

Next the work moves down to the first floor.

As the house had recently been rewired before we bought it I planned to re-use much of this, so I wasn’t ready for what greeted me beneath the floor boards.  It is a chaotic mess and the joists look like swiss cheese rather than structural timbers … no pianos upstairs then.

There are 4 generations of wiring under the boards; cotton wrapped, rubber and two sets of PVC cables.  There are also some interesting wires from junction boxes, as below.

I planned a couple of key routes and used a combination of Visio and a spreadsheet to note down all the details and to help me identify each cable and track which ones I’d installed. 

An image of the layout on the top floor of our house and some of the cables detailed follows.

This stage of planning took several iterations as it required some agreement over location of major pieces of furniture and room layout:- no point in having a data or mains socket behind a wardrobe.  This was complicated by my decision to use Idratek relays for control of certain appliances e.g. TV, so location of these had to be agreed and radial mains cables used to these points.  More cables came with my desire to be able to control the heating requiring cables to each radiator so a valve actuator could be used.  More work arose here as I found it very difficult to find a reliable plumber so I did all the radiator sizing calculations myself and also relocated most of the (under sized) radiators . 

To help track room occupancy (and to provide burglar alarm features) each room has a door sensor and some rooms have PIRs (passive infrared movement sensors) where the ones built into Idranet devices are not ideally suited.  I have actually planned  more than strictly needed of these extra detectors because we have a cat and I suspect it could be a problem tracking people and not animals without specialist pet-immune PIRs.

For data and audio visual sources I have decided to feed Cat5 cable and 75 ohm co-axial cable to each room, both of which will be routed back to Node0 where an 8 way TV amplifier plus a network patch panel, switch and ADSL router are planned.

 Due to cost I am not in the market for a traditional multi-room AV system but I have worked out that most use either wireless or Cat5 so in planning I have treated this as another data service to support but didn’t plan in too much detail what to hang on the ends.  The top candidate for me is probably a squeezebox based system, as the display can be integrated into Cortex, but I am increasingly attracted to UPnP or DLNA devices as there is a greater variety of units available.  I have planned for speakers in the kitchen and bathroom, but have not yet sorted out how to control volume or source selection in these areas.

 The family room is a large and general purpose space so this has the highest number of cables including:

• Multiple lighting channels (a light channel may consist of several lamps but can be controlled separately from other light channels)
• speaker cable for 7.1 surround sound  all routed back to an audio visual node (NodeAV)
• provision for a projector
• automated projector screen & curtains
• automated Velux window
• PIR
• Multiple door sensors
• Idratek Multi-function or Display Panel
• Multiple data sockets
• Multiple relay controlled mains sockets (e.g. for TV, floor lamps etc)

I always planned to have my audio visual equipment in a cupboard near the family room but such is the forecast density of cables from the family room I have re-planned to give it its own node where most of the cables are run back to, this not only shorted the runs but reduced congestion in Node0 which is a corner in a utility cupboard. 

 On the 2nd floor another node is planned (Node-I) again to minimise the number of cables run back to Node 0.  This mixture of radial and daisy chain Idranet connections is an advantage of the flexible Idranet topology.  Interesting threads on UKHA_D on door bells here and here prompted me to rethink what I needed at the front door and in the porch, so a mini-node is planned there and another in the cupboard where the under floor heating pipes terminate as (eventually) this will be automated requiring many relays. 

 So in all I have 3 major nodes planned plus a couple of mini-nodes and multiple sensors, wall-plates and Idratek devices in rooms, which seems a lot, but may plan is to get the infrastructure built and then deploy devices as and when time and budget allows.

What immediately struck me was that the product philosophy had a much wider outlook than others.  It wasn’t just a bunch of industrial relays and dimmers for the enthusiast or installer to cobble the logic around, home automation was at its very core from the network protocol (CAN-bus inspired + audio) through the master-less hardware with built in “Reflex” actions to the sophisticated control programme, “Cortex”.  I am not a software expert but I was blown away by the “obvious when you think about it” use of an Object Oriented approach to the controls.  For example, a relay is a relay, it can be used to control a light, an appliance, a TV, a fan or anything.  Cortex has a prebuilt representation of a light with links to room occupancy, time of day, light level etc.  To control a relay as a light you simply assign it as a light object in a room and it works out which presence state, light meter etc. to link to – fantastic!  About this time I had a long chat with a robotics lecturer friend and this emphasised the message from Idratek that for good control good sensor input is needed, and so as Idratek do not directly support wireless, I really was going to have to put all those wires in!

So while the product looked good on paper, did it work well?  I was greatly assured by David G’s blog and by numerous conversations with Dr Karam Karam, founder and CEO of Idratek.  Karam convinced me that the system was capable of doing just about everything I wanted and significantly more; David’s experiences gave me confidence it was capable of some pretty clever stuff and that it did just work when left alone.

While there are some old (X10) and emerging standards (XAP / xPL / Zigbee / Z-wave) the current market is dominated by a plethora of proprietary systems.  There is no one product (or product family) that does everything and so the starting point was to sit down and think in detail about my objectives in the future and how to prepare to support them, rather than put some wires in and hope for the best.

In retrospect I would classify the main areas of potential automation as

• Lighting (including dimming and scenes)
• Home Cinema (HD content)
• Whole house audio
• Whole house video (standard def or HD)
• IR distribution (to support audio and video distribution)
• Appliance control
• Heating control (independent zones & hot water, solar panel control)
• Security Alarms, CCTV & Entry Systems
• Fire and flood alarms
• Irrigation & water recycling
• Ventilation
• Curtains and blinds
• Communications (voice mail, email alerts, web server, etc)
• Remote Control (Infra Red (IR), web, voice, touchtone, email, SMS, Radio Frequency (RF))

At the outset I hadn’t considered many of these but eventually I planned for most of them!