Adventures in wiring an old (very old) house

I'm an engineer. Let's just start there. I'm an engineer that has built out many datacenters. With thousands and thousands of wires. And lots of power. I realize most houses don't have the kinds of requirements data centers have where wires change from time to time.

That said, wow. The wiring in the new house is "special" to say the least. There are some bright spots - even though most of the outlets are two prong vs. 3 prong grounded, many have a consistent ground wired to the metal boxes. That means I can somewhat easily change out the outlets. Which is good as many (most) are so worn that they won't hold a plug.

I'm even more impressed (depressed) by the amount of telephone/alarm/fire alarm/intercom (!!) wiring that runs through the building. The basement (yay! I have a basement!) is an interesting rats-nest of wires. 

I was referred to an electrician by my real estate agent - who was in construction for a few years before transitioning to real estate. Oleg the Electrician (that's how he's listed in my contacts!) is going to be a long term partner in the evolution of this house. 

First things first: wiring for network. Yes, this is important. The original network was interesting at best. Nothing near sufficient for what I want. 

So we (oleg) pulled more than 2000 ft. of cat6 from the various rooms. I put the main cable modem in the basement (yay basement!) and installed a small rack with a firewall and a POE switch. This allows me to run security cameras off the switch or Access Points as needed. The house is so spread out, I knew I'd need more than one AP. 

Next we pulled a cable to the attic (yay attic - even a stand up attic!). This feeds yet another POE switch. As there were several telephone lines in existence, we just replaced those with the cat6 feeds where appropriate. Running the wires out to the family room proved an interesting challenge - there's a crawl space, but it's really kind of dicey. Most is really easy until the last few feet. There are all kinds of dead spaces where the original house meets the 1770 remodel, and where the 1770 remodel hits the 1970 remodel. 

The house was built mostly on ledge - which is Maine speak for "solid granite as far as the eye can see". This makes the house very stable, but limits where you can put things. I understand the dead spots, but it is certainly an interesting exercise figuring out where your wire snake went - 3 feet of snake just disappeared. Digging around a little and we find a blank vent about 10' tall and 3 ft deep. 

This made running the lines to the family room (great room? We can't figure out what to call it, but it's the giant room with the TV, so let's call it the family room) was challenging but after a few hours we were able to conquer the beast. Each line is over 150ft long. Oleg was impressed when I asked him to run 5 lines to the family room. There are reasons tho - I currently have my office (desk) in the family room as it's a bit isolated and I can work from home without disturbing the rest of the family. That setup takes 2 hardwired ports. Next I wanted two security cameras on the end looking out. I may add another to look into the woods just to see the animals at night. We'll see about that. In addition, I'm installing a really awesome little in-wall AP with 4 hardwired ports for the TV setup. This gives me great connectivity for my appleTV, ShieldTV and Alexa Cube. I've not quite decided which one is going to win out - possibly the shield as it has full support for all the codecs I typically use (eliminating transcoding)

As we go, I've asked Oleg to remove wiring where we can figure out what's on the other end. Needless to say, not much has been removed quite yet, but we have big plans!

To help things, I asked Oleg to install some lighting in the garage. It was previously illuminated by the lights in the garage door openers. That is really insufficient for my needs. So we put in about 4 x 4 ft LED lights and 3 x 8 ft lights. Still not quite enough, but it's way better. 

I'm not sure what's next but likely it's going to be wiring the security lights on the end of the family room - mostly so we can see the dogs when we let them out at night.

On to the next adventure in plumbing!