How to Properly Wire a House

Wiring a new house can be time-consuming. It's hard to predict exactly what types of wire and how much current you'll need for each room, but a little planning can go a long way. Here are a few things to remember when you wire your home.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Electrical, phone and network wires
• Conduit, various sizes
• Outlet and phone jack plates

Wire a House Properly

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.

Tips & Warnings

• Avoid laying conduit around sharp corners, because it makes wire installation difficult and also restricts data flow in some network cables.
• Don't install your electrical wires yourself unless you have experience with wiring. There are many health risks both during and after the wiring of your house that can be avoided by having a licensed electrician do the work.
• If you're installing both electrical and audio wires, make sure that they never cross and are at least 1 foot apart from each other. This will help minimize interference on the audio signal.
• Be absolutely sure to ground your main electrical box in the basement.

Who Can Help:

• Find Home Audio Electrical Services Here. Compare Up to 4 Quotes, Free Service & No Obligation.
• Find Electrical Services Here. Compare Up to 4 Quotes, Free Service & No Obligation.