Planning AV Cables for a home build or renovation.
We can work out which cables will be needed for your new smart home
Put in the right Cables – While you can.
We can provide you with a full plan for your home automation cables.
It is cost effective and easy to put the cables in during a renovation project, or during the build of a new house, but it’s difficult and costly to do it at any other time.
If you plan to sell the house at some point, having the right cables already in place, will enhance it’s value and attractiveness to a potential buyer. If it is a minimalist but luxurious home, then not having the right cables, could be a barrier to achieving it’s true market value.
What cables do we need for a smart home? Isn’t everything going wireless?
People are becoming more reliant upon good Wi-fi and there are more and more products on the market which use Wi-fi. This means that it is particularly important to ensure that larger homes have good wifi coverage. Whilst it is possible to buy products which improve wifi coverage without the use of cables, These are usually a compromise. The best and most reliable performance is achieved by utilising cables to bring fast connections to a number of wifi access points, and then only rely on the wi-fi radio signals for the last part of the journey to your handheld devices.
What cables do I need for home automation and home AV?
Most professional installers of home automation equipment will try to use hard wired connections wherever possible as these make for faster speeds and better reliability. This isn’t about to change as there are inherent limitations to how much information can be sent wirelessly.
We can advise you on the cabling you need for home automation
For this consultancy work, we can often agree a price in advance, or we can work based upon an hourly rate.
Because we have been through this process many times, we already have templates which we can use efficiently to provide you with a comprehensive plan at a reasonable cost. For example we recently prepared a complete cable schedule for four storey a six bedroom luxury house. The proposed house has a gym , cinema room motorised gates etc. The set of information which we provided to the property developer included a requirements table, a 12 page cable schedule with over 120 cables, marked up versions of the architect’s cad drawings showing all cable and ceiling speaker locations , touch screens and wifi access point locations, over four floors and a description of the features which could be supported by the cabling. This took us four days to complete at £300+ VAT per day. a smaller project would of course cost less.
What is the process to design the cabling for home AV?
The process is usually something like this:
We start by studying the architects drawings and discussing the possibilities. A common approach is to allocate a cupboard or a small room to house the majority of the equipment. This keeps the rest of the house relatively free from visible cables and gadgets. We can describe to you what is possible and help you to decide which services should be catered for, by the cables to each room.
The services which you might want to consider cabling for are: Control and dimming of the lighting, Wifi access points ( to provide full Wifi coverage throughout larger homes). Ceiling speakers for music etc. Providing all of the right signals for wall mounted TVs. Motorised window blinds, Motorised projection screen, hard wired home network. User friendly ways to control everything , including control of your heating , air conditioning and security systems. You may want to cater for a few on wall touch screens. These would be able to control everything which I have already mentioned. These touch screens can also act as video intercom panels as well as providing a convenient way to view live pictures from any CCTV cameras or video entry panels etc. all of these services could be made to interface with voice control services such as Alexa.
What cable planning Information is usually provided?
We usually prepare a table showing which features our clients would like in each room. We then we use the requirements table to prepare an AV cable schedule. The cable schedule lists all of the cables that would be needed, together with notes about where they run to and from, how they should be terminated etc.
If required we can go a step further by adding to the architects autocad drawings to show locations for speakers , TVs etc and for the cables which will serve them. If you only want us to advise you which cables to put in, that’s fine , we are happy to do as much or as little as you wish. The information which we provide will always be based upon a fully thought through system design, so that you will have the option to select us to provide and install an appropriate set of equipment at a later date.
We would love to discuss your requirements. If this is of interest please give us a call.
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Richard and his excellent team created an absolutely amazing cinema room for us, beyond our expectations and within our budget. They were polite, tidy and worked diligently. Can't recommend them highly enough. If you're considering making a cinema room, this company is the best, so professional and a pleasure to deal with. We've had our cinema room for a couple of years now, and we absolutely love it, as do friends and family.
Richard’s expertise and consultative approach, makes him a real pleasure to work with. The project turned our double garage into a home cinema room run via Control 4. The garage itself posed a number of constraints (location of the consumer unit, water cylinder, heating controls, etc), which Richard worked through to provide us with a number of options. Their approach encompassed collaboratively working with the building contractor, carpet provider, and cinema seating provider. UK Home Cinemas fitted us the perfect home cinema, and the end result exceeded our expectations. We cannot recommend them Richard and the team highly enough.
Richard from UK home cinemas is great at what he does and pleasure to work with. Richard spent countless hours discussing our design to ensure we could use our new room for all activities we wanted. He was very patient showing and discussing with us potential options and alternatives for what was novel idea and fairly complex design. We had to take into account number of limitation and particularities with heating, air conditioning, lighting and existing speaker and network installation. Richard designed, built and installed perfect acoustic housings for our in-wall speakers as well as number of other features. He and his team worked tirelessly to ensure we get results we wanted. Richard and his team worked collaboratively with subcontractors and our builder.
We would highly recommend UK home cinemas for any media room installation project.
Fantastic service. Richard was very helpful and offered lots of great advice. Even helped give me some ideas when building my own home cinema room. Fantastic service once again and would definitely recommend.
Out of hours, I reached out to UK Home Cinemas for help with a technical problem on my home cinema system. Over a video call, they quickly provided me with exactly the right technical assistance and solved the problem. This prevented me from incurring a significant expense.
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