Thorfun

thanks for this. really useful information and gives a great positive result by using just Cat6. much for me to consider and digest.

I don't think it's a thread drift at all. it's all to do with plumbing so completely on track. do you know what your hardness ppm is? I can resurrect this discussion with the family but our toilets and washing machine will be on rainwater and so it's just the taps/showers that will be on mains and as we're at the low end of moderately hard I'm just not sure it's worth it.

thanks Rob, all great info. plans are definitely now becoming more concrete. I've got some walls to build and plumbing to do today but I'll think about it all while working and post some kind of finalised plan later.

I’m not 100% sure as SWMBO is doing the bathroom furniture purchasing! I wanted Villeroy Boch but I think she’s chosen Vitra as a cheaper option. but definitely no water squirting up bum included

will do. but, tbh, the comms room (Loxone cabinet) is in the basement next door to the plant room so if I forget a cable or two down there it doesn't matter as running a new cable is trivial as none of it is getting boxed in.

ahh...ok cool. that makes sense. I will be leaving that part of the plumbing up to a professional anyway. I will simply run all the hep2o pipes to the manifolds and let the plumber do the work connecting up the ASHP to UVC and then to the water manifolds and UFH manifolds.

yep. all at the correct height for the toilet's we're buying and the FFL and the soil pipe branch. waiting on the pans to get here so I can test fit to check 'squatting' levels before final fixing of the frames and building the shelving space that will go above the toilets.

spent a couple of days building the stud walls in the kids bathrooms for the Geberit frames. overall, I'm pretty happy. need to do some magic around the soil pipe going to the loft for the AAVs to get plasterboard fixed but in true @pocster fashion I'm sure I'll figure something out!

tap up @ETC as he offered to help members with designs and, from what I've seen so far from other posts, his ideas have been brilliant.

free walk on glazing with every copy

you argue the case well and it's hard to not just do it <input Nike tick emoji here>. I've not got enough brain power to be able to consider running cables for this.

I was actually thinking of running fibre to the TV points just in case. for the cost of a reel of fibre I thought it was a bit of a no-brainer.

and it's this that's making the decision so hard! I want the house to be as maintenance free as possible (with regards to future work on it) and so I don't want to be ripping out cables in 10 years. but who's to say that even if I do put in Cat6A that I still won't have to do that anyway? I remember you also saying that Cat6A was a bit harder to run? was it hard enough that if you had the choice again you would do Cat6?

this is a great idea. I did use uplan but their automated cable runs were shocking. I also have a laminated A1 printout of our electrical drawings so I could annotate on that with a whiteboard marker.

yeah, was just thinking about any future selling/reverting back to 'normal' so with dedicated T&E someone could do that. but now I'm heading down your route of thinking and going all-in on Loxone and automation and sticking two fingers at whoever comes after. yeah, I remember reading you did this. but I also remember reading you saying Cat6A was probably overkill! which makes me wonder if it's worth it. good to know. so, again, Cat6 should be sufficient if cable runs aren't long.

still comes down to Cat6 or Cat6A at the end of the day though, doesn't it? 😉 because I can? is that a valid answer? I have an Apple TV but I haven't done matrix video distribution yet and I'm a geek who likes to mess around with technology. fair enough! not planning on using the overpriced Loxone downlights tbh. but will double check the spec and cost of them again. someone to make all the decision for me and to come and install it all for nothing?

too late! already bought them. 😉 thanks and this also supports what @joth did by not bothering with the T&E. quote: he also mentions voltage drop but the trouble is I have no idea at the moment if I will need 24V power delivery and so don't know if I need to take the Cat6A route or not. part of me is thinking just 'belt and braces' it but the other part is thinking about costs and ease of installation/termination. again, I don't really have very long runs and even 4K CCTV video H.264 compressed is only 10Mbps so we're really not even getting close to 1Gbps let alone the need for 10Gbps. and all my runs will be well below the 55m limit for 10Gbps over Cat6 anyway. this is good advice and I am still adding runs to my electrical layout and I will probably still be doing so until everything is boarded over. and even then I will have access from my comms room to the loft so can still distribute around the house if necessary. yeah. was planning on colour coding it. makes things easy to recognise although I wasn't going to differentiate between data and PoE as with my compulsions I'd never be able to run a PoE device on a data cable. 😂 thank you for taking the time to post a response.

hello all. my thoughts are turning to first fix electrics and I need to decide what cable I'm going to pull through for my Loxone system and networking. Network I've pretty much decided that my network cables will be Cat6 as I don't have any switches capable of 10Gbps and if I eventually do then Cat6 will do 10Gbps under 55m and my longest run in the house will be about 30m so I really don't see the point of installing Cat6a. BUT....and there's always a but somewhere...I remember someone saying that they distributed video via a HDBase-T matrix (I think it was @joth?) and that he recommended Cat6a for that. I AM planning on distributing video via a HDBaseT matrix but I was wondering if maybe some cable like this https://www.fscables.com/products/cat-6-hdbaset.html that are Cat6 and tested/recommended by the HDBaseT alliance would do the job instead of Cat6a? anyone got any comments on this? Loxone every room will have a Tree occupancy sensor and a Touch tree switch but some rooms will also include a standard retractive switch to control lights from another location, e.g his and her side of the beds for the bedroom lights, entrance from utility room to kitchen etc. I was originally going to run a single cable to each device but now I'm thinking that's just crazy and I am thinking of running a single tree cable to the presence sensors throughout the house to make use of that and also tree cable to each Touch switch and then daisy chaining to any other retractive switches in the room. I guess I could also run a single tree cable to each room and daisy chain to each touch/sensor/retractive switch in that room? kind of a halfway house for radial wiring? so, is that a crazy idea and should I simply run a cable to every device or is that the crazy idea!? And if I do the one cable to each room and daisy chain from there should I use tree or cat6 or cat6a? I was originally thinking of running a Cat6 AND a 1.5mm T&E to each Touch switch but then realised that Tree cable (https://www.fscables.com/products/tree-cable-jumper-wire-designed-for-loxone-system.html?name=loxone&type=simple) has the 1.5mm cable as part of the single cable albeit at the cost of 2 pairs of twisted wires. I don't see a problem with losing 2 twisted pairs especially as pretty much everyone on here that has a Loxone system ( @jack, @joth, @Dan F, @Hilldes) have all said that most of the twisted pairs from their Cat6/Cat6A cable aren't used. But, if I'm not using Loxone LED lights I presume I don't need the 1.5mm cables as the Touch switches and presence sensors only use the 2 x twisted pairs, right? arrggghh!! it does my head in trying to figure out what I might eventually need. I sourced my equipment from @Rob99 as it was before Loxone started selling direct again and I'm hoping that someone on here will be able to help out.

yeah, I was very happy with his quote and work! he was a one man band (with an occasional helper/labourer) so it took quite a while but that wasn't an issue for us as we're definitely not a speedy build.

we've discussed water softeners quite a bit in our household. according to Southern Water we have 'Hard' water which according to this website (https://www.aquacure.co.uk/knowledge-base/uk-hard-water-map/) makes us at the lower end of 'moderately hard' water. with that and the fact that our plant room is in the basement and I'll need some form of sump and pump for the water softener discharge we've decided not to bother with a water softener.

just for the record....I'm not digging up my screed, ufh and insulation just to swap the small amount of sand I used for sharp sand! 😉

yeah, I get that. but my house is pretty much a game of two halves! big vaulted entrance hall in the middle and 2 sides to the house. so all of the east side pipes will go off one way and the west side the other way. just seemed logical to split them up. but I'm leaning towards putting east and west together in attempt at unification of the waring factions.

I just used builders sand. You’re just trying to level it off to give a flat base for the insulation to sit on. note: I’m not a builder and often get things wrong! Hopefully someone who knows what they’re talking about will be along soon.

now I've started creating the manifolds I'm thinking about my proposed layout and whether it's the best way of doing it. this is what I was going to do (option 1). have separate manifolds for each 'side' of the house. but I'm wondering if it might be better to do one big manifold for hot and cold and feed the source from both ends, like this (option 2): any preferences or benefits to either way? or is it all pretty much the same? I'm still a bit confused as to how the HRC manifold feeds back in to the hot manifold but I think that's a question for later!

cheers. I've put the recommended amount of Loctite 55 on it and it's pretty darn tight. guess I'll find out when water is connected as to how good it really is! maybe the rubber washer is a new thing from Wavin?