nothingugly

Around the time of the dot-com crash, I remember hearing a lot of conversations about dream homes. Besides the hardwood flooring and multi-thousand square foot floor plans, they were also “going to be all wired up with fiber optic cable, of course”. Nowadays, that sounds silly; fiber never took off because gigabit Ethernet got cheap. That means that the Cat-5 cable that you probably DID wire you house with is now obsolete, because gig-e requires Cat-5e. And so it goes.

I hope to not so much wire my house as plumb it. I’ll use 1.5″ PVC (larger, where I can get away with it ) to connect a number of wall boxes in the house, with a minimum of one wall box per room. Each wall box will be large enough to contain some kind of switching gear and a 110v outlet. In each pipe, I’ll lay a bit of string, with each end labeled. Then I’ll pull the cable. When I need to upgrade (say, to the new twisted beryllium spec of 2050), I’ll just pull a rope with the string, pull the fish tape with the rope, and pull the cable (and, at the same time, the original string again) with the fish tape. If I need a router (or whatever they’ll call it in 2050) I’ll have a little bit of space for that, and a place to plug it in so it’s hidden. PVC is cheap, and all this work is easy when the walls are open. It’s also possible to pull speaker wire, phone cords, and pretty much any other low voltage cabling. Oh, and you can always do fiber, too.

This is such a cool idea that I’m sure it’ll be illegal for some reason. I’m starting to really hate building code.