How is your house wired?

Answer 1

1

Plan to run all of your electrical wires from a central location in your basement. Set aside an open area where you can set up electrical panels if needed. Keep your central location near other electrical furnishings, like the fuse box.

• 2

Install conduit before you run any type of wire through your home. This tubing protects the wires in your home and also helps keep them organized and in place. You'll probably want to use a larger diameter conduit for your central vein of wiring, and then branch off with smaller sizes for individual rooms.

• 3

Set up at least one electrical outlet and one phone jack in each room. In most rooms, you'll want one electrical outlet on each wall. It's difficult and expensive to cut into drywall and install more outlets later, so you can overestimate how many you'll need.

• 4

Put some extra conduit into the ceilings and walls in each room. This preparation will make it much easier to install a multi-room audio system or additional wiring for internet access later. Tying string off at each of the conduits makes it very easy to pull a new wire through the tubing.

• 5

Color-code your conduit and wiring so that you can keep track of what you've installed. An extensive map of your wiring can make fixing subsequent problems much easier than if you didn't know which wires were connected to which rooms.