First and foremost, I'm going to divide this into three different categories. Security, Networking and Entertainment and try to give you an idea of what I've determined will best suit our needs and wants for our new place.
Security
The main component in the security system is the 2gig Go! alarm. This panel offers tons of security features while also offering z-wave compatibility to handle some home automation duties.
Among the door, window and motion sensors that go along with any alarm, I've also added a tilt sensor for the garage door that will let us know if we've forgotten to close the door, and will set the alarm off if the door is forced open and a moisture/flood sensor that will alert us if water starts accumulating in the basement.
Another thing that I've read a lot of about and found to fill a need that my wife and I have were the Schlage Connect Locks. These locks offer the ability to go keyless as well give us a way to make sure that the doors are all locked when they need to be. With a young one that can't be trusted to lock the door behind himself, these give us peace of mind that the doors are locked when they are supposed to be. They can also be configured to work with the alarm to give us automatic locking and unlocking with the alarm system.
The locks and alarm, combined with a few Z-wave enabled light switches and outlets will make it so that we never have to walk into a pitch black house because we forgot to leave a light on, or lie in bed at night wondering if the back door is locked, and the tilt sensor on the garage door will let us know if we've forgotten to close it. Something that happened quite often at our old house.
In addition to the alarm we also decided to add some surveillance equipment. Having seen first hand the usefulness of having a good video system in place, I decided that it was a must for the new house. During my structured wiring meeting I went ahead and had them add a couple of ethernet runs to various locations on the house to allow me to run POE (power over ethernet) cameras. I chose Hikvision cameras for their awesome picture quality and reputation for building a good camera as well as their attractive price point. They offer many different camera designs for various needs and I went with a combination of cameras to best suit where I wanted them to go. All of the cameras 1080p and are run to a Hikvision NVR with dual WD 4TB hard drives. This will give me continuous recording at 20fps with 1080p resolution for at least a week before I start overwriting the previous recordings. I went with a Hikvision DS-2CD2332-I EXIR camera for the front door location due to it's excellent night vision and the fact that the viewing range would give me good coverage of the driveway as well. For the other locations I used a mix of the DS-2CD2132-I and the DS-2CD2032-I cameras to give me the best coverage of the areas I wanted to keep an eye on. Primarily the ingress points of the house, the back yard and the areas that the vehicles will be kept. All of these cameras are 3mp cameras and from what I've seen online, give you a pretty clear recording.
Networking
This is a little less complicated :) My primary requirements were that I wanted to be able to have solid wifi performance throughout the entire house, which is a little more challenging since it's a three level house, as well as have a system in place to handle the hardwired data connections that we had built into the house for streaming movies and video games.
First off, I picked up a Motorola Surfboard SB6183 cable modem. This is one of the faster modems that they offer and it keeps me from having to pay for the privilege of renting one from Cox.
To handle the wired side of things I'm using a TP-Link 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Switch with 8 ports to connect all the hardwired ethernet in the house and for the wireless side I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme base station and an Airport Express down in the basement to give me both wifi in the basement and an Airplay connection to the multi-room audio system I'll cover in the next section.
Entertainment
Since this is going to be our forever home, we wanted to make sure that it had some of the fun things that we really wanted, while trying to keep it in some sort of a budget. The first thing we wanted was multi-room audio. We liked the idea of being able to have music playing in rooms of the house while were we cleaning or entertaining, or just enjoying the day being bums and laying around the house. The company installing the low voltage wiring throughout the house had a couple of different packages that they offered, but we decided to just have them do the pre-wiring and we would handle the equipment side of things, with the exception being the kitchen speakers. We went ahead and bought those upfront just so that we could have them installed pre-close. For those speakers we went with Klipsch CDT-3650. They were the "better" option offered by the installer and seemed to have a pretty good sound. For the other locations in the house we just had them do a pre-wire with on-wall volume controls so that we could add the speakers later as we wanted. Once of the major things we did was add wiring and a volume control for outside speakers to be put on the deck we are building post close. This will be our primary entertaining space so we thought having music out there would be a nice touch. All of the wiring for the audio was run down into the utility room in the basement along with the wiring for the networking and home theater equipment which will be stored in a media rack.
The amplifier side of the multi-room audio is handled by a Russound D850 8-Channel Amplifier and the input source is handled by the Apple Airport Express
I went with this amp because it offered the one thing that was a must have for me, auto-sensing power-on. What this means is that it will stay on standby until it senses an audio input and then it will automatically turn itself on and stay on until the input stops at which time it will go back into standby. This, combined with the Airport Express will allow me to stream music from my iPhone, iPad or laptop throughout the house without having to go down into the basement and turn anything on. I can simply walk into the room, grab my iPhone and start listening to music. There are far more complex system that you can use, such as Connect4 and Lyric, but for our needs, this is perfect.
For my speaker choice, I went with a brand called Conextion. They aren't well known, and in fact, have been sold to Triad, but I have a local shop that still sells them, and for the price and sound quality they can't be beat. That being said, speakers and sound reproduction are very subjective things, so your opinion my vary.
And last, but not least,
Home Theater
Our previous home was a small townhouse, so due both to it's size and the fact that it was adjoined on both sides by other people, I had to pass on a nice home theater system because I didn't think the neighbors would appreciate it as much as I would. Now that I'm in this big new house I don't have that concern, so it was ON!
For the picture duties I went with a Sony VPL-HW50ES 1080p 3d Projector and a 120" Stewart Filmscreen Firehawk screen. There are a ton of different projectors out there to chose from, but in my opinion the picture quality from the Sony was incredible. I had also considered the Epson 5030 projector, but the fan on them can be a bit noisy and in my basement the projector will be overhead and I was concerned about the noise being a distraction.
For the audio side of the theater I went with a Yamaha Aventage RX-A1040 7.2 Receiver. I've always like the robust sound and power output from Yamaha equipment and this particular unit packs tons of power and has wifi and airplay and all the other goodies.
For the front, rear and side speakers I again went with Conextion speakers. I wanted all the speakers to be ceiling mounted for a nice clean layout and doing that presents more than a few problems when it comes to sound imaging. The Conextion speakers have a couple of really nice features that help overcome those shortcomings. The main driver's pivot in the mounting brackets to allow you to aim the speakers towards the listening position rather than just having them point at the floor, and the tweeter both pivots and extends down from the ceiling to insure the sound goes where you want it to go. The end result is a excellent sound with good clear imagining while keeping the speakers hidden away in the ceiling.
For the subwoofer, I went with an Earthquake Sub-80 Subwoofer. The bass this thing produces is amazing and the build quality is better than other subwoofers costing twice as much.
Again, all the wiring and all the equipment will be mounted in the basement utility room out of sight and away from little kid hands. There are other components to it of course, blu-ray players and video games and whatnot, but that's pretty simple stuff and everyone has an opinion of what works best.
It's important to mention that for the speakers and the projector, all the wiring was done during construction to allow it to be routed and concealed the way it is. I'm also using a Harmony Ultimate Remote control with an IR repeater so that I can control the equipment in the other room.
I think that covered the high points. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. I'll try to help as best I can.
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