What do people do to accommodate SWMBO's desire to move TV's, Hi fi's and speakers around?

J G Miller wrote:

I have a house with every room cabled up for telephone, ethernet, FM,
DAB, DTT, Sky and a non-sky sat system. (except bathroom, Landing and
Hall).

Do you have one of those waterproof radios for the shower?

Some of the common people have the shower in the bathroom, JG.

Bill

"Bill Wright" wrote in message
...
Dave Saville wrote:
No help but, I am curious that you get away with switches etc. in the
loft. Our loft gets *extremely* hot with the sun on it - Currently my
office, not in the loft, is 28C :-( I would have thought the various
boxes would have a short life in the loft.
This is something that worries me. However the life of equipment in normal
lofts doesn't seem to be especially short. Maybe the average temperature
over the year is quite low. Well, thinking about it, it will be.

Equipment in lofts that have heating pipes in them, or in boiler rooms,
now that's different.

Bill

Funnily enough, I've just replaced all the electrolytics in the Avant 5
PSU's with ones rated for 105°C use....... the old ones were rated for 85°C
use and were Capxon's, notorious for drying out and leaking. I put my units
near the loft floor as heat rises.....

R. Mark Clayton wrote:
I think SWMBO does not like all your wiring...

"Stephen" wrote in message
o.uk...
Picture the scenario...

I have a house with every room cabled up for telephone, ethernet,
FM, DAB, DTT, Sky and a non-sky sat system. (except bathroom,
Landing and Hall). The SWMBO likes to on a regular basis move furniture
around in
various rooms. The worst affected so far has been the lounge.

SNIP

Why did you go to the bottom to write the word SNIP and then put your proper
reply at the top? Most strange and bloody annoying.

There seems to have been some recent slagging off regarding the meris ot top
posting vs bottom posting......

"Brian" wrote in message
...
R. Mark Clayton wrote:
I think SWMBO does not like all your wiring...

"Stephen" wrote in message
o.uk...
Picture the scenario...

I have a house with every room cabled up for telephone, ethernet,
FM, DAB, DTT, Sky and a non-sky sat system. (except bathroom,
Landing and Hall). The SWMBO likes to on a regular basis move furniture
around in
various rooms. The worst affected so far has been the lounge.

SNIP

Why did you go to the bottom to write the word SNIP and then put your
proper reply at the top? Most strange and bloody annoying.

On Tuesday, April 26th, 2011, at 17:17:26h +0100, Stephen observed:

There seems to have been some recent slagging off regarding the meris ot
top posting vs bottom posting......

Non-visually-challenged people who top post, should be taken out
and given a good thrashing.

On Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 at 16:46:49h +0100, Bill Wright explained:

Some of the common people have the shower in the bathroom, JG.

As is the case for me, just being a common person of no repute.

But as Stephen explained that he does not have the bathroom cabled,
are you suggesting that he has showering facilities in a room other
than the bathroom viz the bedroom, as is the case in some residential units?

On 26/04/2011 16:27, Dave Saville wrote:
No help but, I am curious that you get away with switches etc. in the
loft. Our loft gets *extremely* hot with the sun on it - Currently my
office, not in the loft, is 28C :-(

I would have thought the various boxes would have a short life in the
loft.

My TV distribution amp suvived more than 25 years in my attic, - and I
live sought of Watford. My ADSL router is also in my attic as that is
where the telephone line enters my house, but I have not had it so long.
One problem that I thought might be due to the unit getting hot was
eventually fixed by a firmware upgrade.


--
Michael Chare

On 26/04/2011 12:02, Stephen wrote:
Picture the scenario...

I have a house with every room cabled up for telephone, ethernet, FM, DAB,
DTT, Sky and a non-sky sat system. (except bathroom, Landing and Hall).

The SWMBO likes to on a regular basis move furniture around in various
rooms. The worst affected so far has been the lounge. So I've already had to
replicate all the cabling in the opposite corner of the room to accommodate
the new furniture layout (the AV gear got moved as part of the new layout).
This involved running new CT100, Ethernet and telephone cables back to the
loft.

There is also a Hi Fi system that requires speakers. At the moment these are
free standing, this unit alone requires DAB, FM and ethernet. At the moment
this is located at one corner of the room while the TV stuff is at the
opposite corner of the room and this uses the DTT, Sky/Freesat and
non-sky/non-freesat feeds and ethernet.

Ethernet is not too much of a problem I can just use extra switches/hubs in
the loft and have all the ports live in all the rooms throughout the house.
This suits us as the laptops do roam around the house. Ditto for telephones
as these are wired in parallel and I can use a REN booster if the total REN
goes over 4.

For the benefit of doubt, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or cordless phones or RF based
AV senders is not an option.

Now for DTT/FM/DAB etc I have 2 multswitches, giving a total of 32 outputs,
16 are sky/freesat only on one multiswitch, the other are non-sky, proving
access to 4 satellites on the other multiswitch. so if I cable four times to
one room, that means only 4 rooms get the full service in every corner
leaving me short of spare outputs at the multiswitches for the other rooms.
If instead I cable all the rooms in the house, I won't have any spare
outputs to have four lots of cables to one room so presenting challenges for
when SWMBO wants to re-arrange the room.

SWMBO has wanted to even rearrange the bedrooms as well but so far I've been
successful in pointing out practical problems such as door
location/orientation etc. For these rooms, I probably can get away with only
cabling opposite ends of the room as the beds can only go in one of two
locations and hence the TV would always be opposite the bed.

How do you all overcome this (Shooting the SWMBO is *not* an option)

I can only see three possible solutions:

(A) Cabling up every corner of the lounge with identical sockets and having
to put a patching panel in the loft and every time the room is rearranged,
nip up to said loft switch the signals to a different faceplate cluster.

(B) putting in a system of smart priority switches in each room as I can
work on the assumption that out of all the 4 socket clusters in each room,
only one will be in active use.

(C) Buy an additional 5x16 (for sky/Freesat) and 17x16 multiswitches and
split the 5 Quattro LNB feeds between them using 20 passive splitters and
increase the dish sizes to accommodate the 3dB splitting loss. (the Avant 5
outputs can be easily split as I have 111dBµV of signal to play with), that
would give me 32 lots of outputs.



I have more outlets than I have multi-switch ports.

There's a bunch of labelled cables at the head-end, and I simply connect
up the ones I need to use as and when required.
It's really not much of an inconvenience.

--
Ron

On 26/04/2011 12:02, Stephen wrote:
Picture the scenario...

I have a house with every room cabled up for telephone, ethernet, FM, DAB,
DTT, Sky and a non-sky sat system. (except bathroom, Landing and Hall).


snip

Do you have a shed?

--
Adrian C

On Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:05:36 +0100
Adrian C wrote:

On 26/04/2011 12:02, Stephen wrote:
Picture the scenario...

I have a house with every room cabled up for telephone, ethernet,
FM, DAB, DTT, Sky and a non-sky sat system. (except bathroom,
Landing and Hall).


snip

Do you have a shed?


That would indeed simplify the required wiring. Then the SWMBO could
live a peaceful life in the house.
QED!
--
Davey.