What to Run Before the Drywall Goes Up

There is exactly one moment in a build when running cable is nearly free, and it lasts about a week. Before insulation and drywall, a cable run is a person with a spool walking between open studs. Afterwards it is fishing walls, cutting access holes, patching, texturing and repainting — and the same run costs ten times as much, assuming it is possible at all.

Almost every expensive retrofit we are called out to in Utah traces back to that week. Here is what to put in during it, roughly in order of how much you will regret skipping it.

Run more Cat6 than you think you need

If you take one thing from this: cable is the cheap part. The material cost of a run is a few dollars. The labour, while the walls are open, is minutes. Adding one later is a half-day job and a painter.

What we would put in as a baseline for a family home:

• Two drops to every television location — one for the display, one spare. Streaming boxes, consoles and soundbars all end up wanting a wired connection, and the spare is always used eventually.
• One drop to every ceiling access point location — roughly one per floor for a small house, more for anything long or split-level. Wireless access points are the one device where wired backhaul makes the biggest difference to how the WiFi actually feels.
• One drop to every desk or likely office wall.
• One drop per camera position, plus two you are not sure about.
• One to each exterior door for future access control or a doorbell that is not battery powered.

All of it terminating in one place. Which brings us to the thing people skip.

Give the equipment somewhere to live

The single most common mistake in a new build is running the cable beautifully and then having nowhere to land it. A structured wiring enclosure in a closet, garage or mechanical room — with power in it and some ventilation — is what turns a pile of cable into a system.

What ends up in there: the network switch, the router, the camera recorder, the alarm panel, the access controller. That is a real amount of heat and a real amount of noise, which is why it belongs in a closet and not behind the television.

Ask for a dedicated circuit. Ask for it to be somewhere you can stand up. And ask for it to be somewhere that is not going to be full of coats within a year.

Doors and windows, before insulation

Wireless sensors are good now, and there is nothing wrong with them. But two things are much better done in the wall:

• Exterior door contacts — a recessed contact in the frame is invisible, never needs a battery, and cannot be pulled off.
• Door strike wiring to any door you might ever put access control on. Front door, garage entry, office, gate. This is the run people most often wish they had.

Also worth a conduit while you are at it: a length of smurf tube from the enclosure to the attic and another to a crawl space or basement. That single detail is what makes every future addition a one-hour job instead of a project.

The outside of the house

Camera positions want thinking about before the soffit goes up, because the good positions are all high and none of them are reachable later.

The rule that matters: cameras belong at pinch points, not at corners of the property. A camera watching the front door, the driveway entrance and the side gate will do more than six cameras surveying open lawn. Fewer, better-placed, lower down than instinct suggests — a camera at eight to ten feet gets a usable face; one at the roofline gets the top of a hat.

Run cable to more positions than you will use on day one. An unused cable coiled in a soffit costs nothing. A new one costs a lift and a painter.

Two things people forget

A cellular path for the alarm. If the alarm reports over broadband only, then the internet is a single point of failure for the one system whose entire job is to work when things go wrong. A cellular communicator is the fix and it is much easier to plan for than to add.

Where the internet actually enters the building. On rural and canyon properties in Utah this is often the whole problem — the service comes in at the wrong end, or does not come in at all. If you are building somewhere that fibre has not reached, decide early, because a satellite install has mounting and cable-path implications the framer needs to know about.

What this costs you to get right

Substantially less than getting it wrong. Pre-wire on a typical home is a day or two of labour and a few hundred dollars of cable. The same capability retrofitted, two years later, runs into the thousands and involves your walls.

We do this work with builders across Utah County and the Wasatch Back. If you are at framing — or better, still at plan review — that is the right time to call. Our WiFi coverage planner will give you a sensible access point count from your floor plan in the meantime, and there is more detail on how we approach it on our pre-wire page.

For the full picture of what a new build gets from one low-voltage contractor — pre-wire through security, network, audio and automation — see new construction low voltage in Utah. And if a theater is on the plans, the conduit and speaker locations for our home theater installation work are decided at this same stage.