Saturday, 21 July 2012

Met electrician on site to go over electrical plan

We had an on-site meeting with the electrician who is subcontracting for our builder. They can also install light fixtures and connect up data cables after hand over from the builder (we didn't have that included in the contract with builder as they will charge a premium for that), so I have asked them to give us a quote on those bits that are not included in the contract with our builder. If the same electrician can do the wiring and the connection/fitting of lighting and data cables it would save us the hassle of hiring and explaining things twice. 

We have decided to go with LED down lights all throughout the house. The initial cost will be more than with regular down lights but we had to have our front foyer down lights in energy efficient light fitting for BASIX compliance anyway, so we thought we might as well go the whole hog and have LED down lights throughout the house. The light cast by LED and regular down lights are different visually, so we didn't want part of the house to have different look to the other parts. 

We will also have fairly extensive data cable network throughout the house for TV, Foxtel, video/audio files stored on NAS devices, as well as phone and internet which will all be connected up to a Hub that we will place under the staircase in the centre of the house. To that end we have four data cables each going into our lounge room, kids' playroom, home theatre, and master bedroom. The minor bedrooms (kids' and guests') will have two Cat6 data cables going in to each room. We are planning to have a video feed coming from the security camera placed at the front of the house to go through the hub and be accessible to each room (just so we can see who is out at the front of the house without having us actually walk up to the front window).

Click to view larger image of electrical plan.