paradise
Spooner
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So, there's lots of doom and gloom lately (I feel it too) but I figured some may get a kick out of a project we're about 12 months into.
The property is ~50 acres outside of San Diego of which about 15 acres has been improved. There is >50k sqft under roof between two main houses, a ranch hand's house, pool house, barn, shop and RV garage. The two main houses are 10k and 12k sqft and the pool house is around 3k ft
Besides the structures there is a large arena, many outdoor stalls and some irrigated pastures. They do horse breeding so the facilities are actually working which is really cool.
Our scope on the project is the Audio/Video, Surveillance, Network, Lighting Control and then the Home Control (Automation) to make it all work together. In initial talks with the client we were discussing the best way to integrate the systems and how to handle two separate households needing access to the common areas to control music, lighting, TVs, pools, etc. The client was initially thinking of doing separate systems for each of the main houses and then a separate system for the pool house. I really hated the idea of the users having to switch to another system controller to access the common areas so we went back to the drawing board. In the end we settled on two separate ELAN system controllers. One that controls Main House 1 and the second that Controls Main House 2 and all the common areas. This led to a number of unique challenges that we have had to design around but it has made for a super fun project.
A lot of engineering and work goes into these projects before the first bit of material is ordered or wire installed. We've got a piece of software we use to design and visualize all of the interconnects between each device in the system for power, coax, audio, ethernet, etc. When all filled out that software looks like this:
Once we have all of our connections made inside the software, we can then export an excel sheet that has all of our wires, their number, where they go to and from and where they connect on the near and far end. After some formatting they look like this:
We then take those into our label making software and print them out on rolls of Brady labels. One for each side of every wire... lots of labels
As the guys pull the wires they keep track of which are installed on the spreadsheet you saw above and we can be sure that we are going to have every wire we need for the system. No guessing, no funky labeling and everything is tracked and easy to find.
The next thing we do that is a little unique is that while still in rough we go through and terminate all of wires on both ends. We'll put a keystone or RJ45 on each wire (depending on what it will need long term) and then go through with our fluke certifier to ensure all wires are undamaged and pass CAT6 certification. We do that to ensure that our wires were not damaged when we pulled them in. This certification report gets handed off to the contractor along with the wire list so everyone is on the same page that all wires are undamaged
We will do this again right after drywall installation to ensure that none of the wires were damaged and everything is still good to go. it's much easier to pull down a few sheets of drywall right after it's hung vs finish time 
Here is what one of those certification reports looks like, 1 page per wire.
In addition to generating wire numbers and labels we also generate wiring diagrams where prudent to help visualize where wires are going and what they'll be used for. This is the fiber diagram for this project showing the individual strands between buildings and where they'll be patched into. This only shows 6 strand fiber between each building but we ended up going with a 12 strand to have some headroom. I believe our longest fiber run is just over 2000 ft so nothing terribly long but well out of the reach of CATx.
The fiber we're using on this project to connect the buildings is all Singlemode 12 strand outdoor rated fiber that will all be pulled through 2.5" conduit. Everything we purchased for the connections between buildings is all pre-terminated and rolled on spools at the lengths required. We pulled mule tape through each run of conduit to get the lengths required and ordered from our supplier. They were actually incredibly quick and got us the fiber in just over a week! As you can see the fiber has pulling eyes installed and is just bigger than a direct burial CAT6.
The actual network across the whole property is one large layer 3 network. We have VLANs for each of the two main houses primary network, each house's IP video distribution network and the lighting control (all shared between both houses
). With this configuration we're able to give both houses their own internet service, provide connectivity between the VLANs for control of shared devices and allow for the entire lighting control system across the entire property to be one shared system. On top of that, both houses will share Starlink as a backup internet source should COX go down in the area. We're using 10G SFP adapters for the backbone between all switches and a central 10G aggregate switch to connect everything together. 10G is absolutely necessary for the video portion of the network because each video stream requires ~800Mb of bandwidth. We'll be transferring up to 5 streams of video over a single strand of fiber which puts us at only 40% utilization.
This is just temped up for testing obviously (pardon the mess) but it's pretty amazing how much data we can push over a single strand of fiber.
I'll try to go into a little more detail on each of the subsystems we're using in posts below and try to keep this updated as time goes on. We've probably got 6-8 more months on the project if I had to guess.
The property is ~50 acres outside of San Diego of which about 15 acres has been improved. There is >50k sqft under roof between two main houses, a ranch hand's house, pool house, barn, shop and RV garage. The two main houses are 10k and 12k sqft and the pool house is around 3k ft
Our scope on the project is the Audio/Video, Surveillance, Network, Lighting Control and then the Home Control (Automation) to make it all work together. In initial talks with the client we were discussing the best way to integrate the systems and how to handle two separate households needing access to the common areas to control music, lighting, TVs, pools, etc. The client was initially thinking of doing separate systems for each of the main houses and then a separate system for the pool house. I really hated the idea of the users having to switch to another system controller to access the common areas so we went back to the drawing board. In the end we settled on two separate ELAN system controllers. One that controls Main House 1 and the second that Controls Main House 2 and all the common areas. This led to a number of unique challenges that we have had to design around but it has made for a super fun project.
A lot of engineering and work goes into these projects before the first bit of material is ordered or wire installed. We've got a piece of software we use to design and visualize all of the interconnects between each device in the system for power, coax, audio, ethernet, etc. When all filled out that software looks like this:
Once we have all of our connections made inside the software, we can then export an excel sheet that has all of our wires, their number, where they go to and from and where they connect on the near and far end. After some formatting they look like this:
We then take those into our label making software and print them out on rolls of Brady labels. One for each side of every wire... lots of labels
As the guys pull the wires they keep track of which are installed on the spreadsheet you saw above and we can be sure that we are going to have every wire we need for the system. No guessing, no funky labeling and everything is tracked and easy to find.
The next thing we do that is a little unique is that while still in rough we go through and terminate all of wires on both ends. We'll put a keystone or RJ45 on each wire (depending on what it will need long term) and then go through with our fluke certifier to ensure all wires are undamaged and pass CAT6 certification. We do that to ensure that our wires were not damaged when we pulled them in. This certification report gets handed off to the contractor along with the wire list so everyone is on the same page that all wires are undamaged
Here is what one of those certification reports looks like, 1 page per wire.
In addition to generating wire numbers and labels we also generate wiring diagrams where prudent to help visualize where wires are going and what they'll be used for. This is the fiber diagram for this project showing the individual strands between buildings and where they'll be patched into. This only shows 6 strand fiber between each building but we ended up going with a 12 strand to have some headroom. I believe our longest fiber run is just over 2000 ft so nothing terribly long but well out of the reach of CATx.
The fiber we're using on this project to connect the buildings is all Singlemode 12 strand outdoor rated fiber that will all be pulled through 2.5" conduit. Everything we purchased for the connections between buildings is all pre-terminated and rolled on spools at the lengths required. We pulled mule tape through each run of conduit to get the lengths required and ordered from our supplier. They were actually incredibly quick and got us the fiber in just over a week! As you can see the fiber has pulling eyes installed and is just bigger than a direct burial CAT6.
The actual network across the whole property is one large layer 3 network. We have VLANs for each of the two main houses primary network, each house's IP video distribution network and the lighting control (all shared between both houses
This is just temped up for testing obviously (pardon the mess) but it's pretty amazing how much data we can push over a single strand of fiber.
I'll try to go into a little more detail on each of the subsystems we're using in posts below and try to keep this updated as time goes on. We've probably got 6-8 more months on the project if I had to guess.
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