WELCOME TO RIVER DAVES PLACE

Cool AV/Automation Project

paradise

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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:
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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:
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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 :)
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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 :D

Here is what one of those certification reports looks like, 1 page per wire.
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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.
Fiber.png


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.
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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.
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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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paradise

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One more for now before I have to run.

In this case we have a really good relationship with both the GC and the drywaller (plus our own dedicated rooms) so we actually went ahead and landed all of our wires on our 2 post rack before our initial round of certification. We don't always use a 2 post rack, but in instances where we have this much wire it makes sense.

We'll have overhead ladder racking coming from this rack up and over to support all the wires connecting from the 4 post equipment racks (I'll show those later) to the 2 post patch panels. Once these wires were all terminated and tested we wrapped the rack and the wires in plastic and they drywalled around us :p. It saves us a bunch of hours having to land the wires again after the initial certification.

How it starts
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How it ends (yes these are two separate racks. One from Main house 1 and one from Main House 2):
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ltbaney1

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so much of that is over my head, but it looks awesome and like you have your plan laid out well and easy to follow. thank you for sharing.
 

monkeyswrench

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Tech stuff like this amazes me. The amount of information shared and transmitted is massive. That one property has a lot going on.

I'm pretty impressed with sparkys running 10-2 and 10-3, you guys have spaceship looking stuff:oops:
 

HNL2LHC

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Impressive. Thanks for sharing and making me realize how much my life and home automation or lack there of sucks. 👍
 

DLC

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That looks awesome!

a couple years back I had to remove & haul off all cat 5 wire in a commercial building. I got 2 -8 ft truck beds mounded up about 30 to 36 inch tall and pocketed about $1500 cash at the recycling yard!

it’s amazing how heavy that wire is…
 

paradise

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so much of that is over my head, but it looks awesome and like you have your plan laid out well and easy to follow. thank you for sharing.
As I'm adding more info I'll try to touch on the technical side as well as breaking it down to be hopefully easy to understand why we go in a certain direction. This is just the planning and infrastructure LOL
Very cool stuff. Things like this fascinate me.
Absolutely, I've got a lot more to come, there are some cool things on the property and some fun stuff with lighting for the horse breeding etc planned.
That looks awesome!

a couple years back I had to remove & haul off all cat 5 wire in a commercial building. I got 2 -8 ft truck beds mounded up about 30 to 36 inch tall and pocketed about $1500 cash at the recycling yard!

it’s amazing how heavy that wire is…
Try sending a cute girl next time LOL. Amazing how much more they seem to get at the yards
I had the exact same post.

I’m hoping my next place has a ton of this. Lighting, window covering, etc etc. I love it.
It's super fun. This one will have shading integrated as well. We ended up handing that off to a dedicated shade contractor but everything will end up getting integrated through the control system. 😍
 

paradise

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Tech stuff like this amazes me. The amount of information shared and transmitted is massive. That one property has a lot going on.

I'm pretty impressed with sparkys running 10-2 and 10-3, you guys have spaceship looking stuff:oops:
We'll have hundreds of devices on the network, some stuff segmented out onto it's own portion of the network and some able to talk to everything. I'll dive into that more in a later post but it's pretty neat what we can do on a residential property. 👍
 

mjc

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Is this a new build or some existing?
 

paradise

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Very cool project. The cabling in those racks is a lot cleaner than I've seen in datacenters for some pretty big companies.
Our guys do amazing work and take a ton of pride in the end product. Even the stuff that’s in a closet and no one but us nerds care about 🤪
 

Waterjunky

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Our guys do amazing work and take a ton of pride in the end product. Even the stuff that’s in a closet and no one but us nerds care about 🤪
As it should be..... Pride in your work even if you are the only one who will ever see it.
 

Xtrmwakeboarder

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@paradise This is what you're doing, correct? This was the video that opened my eyes to this stuff. Amazing what planning goes into this.
 

paradise

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Lighting:
As I alluded to earlier the lighting control system on this project is one giant system. The challenges of making multiple homes, with shared common spaces act as if they are combined for certain actions and separated for others is not easy. We've done combined homes in the past but they were smaller and a single large system controller was a reasonable way to do it. In this instance we had too many cameras, too many zones of audio and video to make a single system controller work. We had to separate it into two systems but the lighting still needed to be combined so either family could control the pool lights from their house or turn on/off the barn lighting etc.

To accomplish that we had to move the Vantage lighting control system to it's own segmented network (VLAN) that is then available at all areas around the property. Each of the buildings has a lighting controller in one of the Lighting Control Panels (LCP). Each of the large lighting control panels can hold up to four lighting modules (relays, fan controllers, standard dimming, universal dimming, etc) and each of those modules can handle between 4 and 12 loads. Back to the early planning, the lighting design has to be completed before the electrician begins running any wires. We have to identify the loads, what type of dimming they need (Forward phase, reverse phase, 0-10, dmx, dali, etc), what modules are going to go in which location and the loads on each module. Once we have all that info we can provide an enclosure schedule for each enclosure on the project to the electrician
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On this project there are a total of 14 Enclosures and 6 controllers. Each building has one controller and multiple panels. The panels connect to the controller via simple 4 wire bus. Then, those controllers are all connected together with the network I described above via the 10Gb fiber backbones between each building. The electrician, Marc, on this project is doing an amazing job. Here is one of the panels in the barn.
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Each one of the wires to a load has to be homerun back to the lighting control panels so they are typically spread around the house in utility closets and other unused areas to ensure their runs are as short as possible. Since the lighting control panels do all of the switching we need keypads to control the lights. The Keypads all run on a single 2 conductor bus that is wired throughout the entire building back to the main controller for that building. The bus carries the 48v to power the keypads plus all communications and with the way the system is designed it actually meets code to share a box with 120v wiring as well. That makes it really nice in a situation where a client wants lighting control but also wants locally switched items. They keypads hookups are super simple and allow us to attach motion detectors or contactors directly at the keypad
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Vantage has a ton of options for colors, button styles and plate styles but of course the most commonly used are white or light almond.
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Programming in Vantage is reasonably easy and can be as simple or as complex as you want/need it to be. This is a different project but the principals are the same. in this example, when the button is pressed all we are doing is setting the level of the deck sconces to 85%. Ramp and fade times set how long it takes to fade up or down from 0-100% when the button is pressed. For example you may want a longer setting when used for a theater 'Movie Start' scene to slowly dim the lights but a very fast (0s) time for an emergency or panic button.
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Here is an example of some motion programming. When you press the off button when leaving the room, it first locks the motion detector so it can't trigger an 'on' command. It stops the shower plan (which turns on the shower light, then turns on the shower exhaust fan a couple minutes later and then turns the exhaust fan off after a specified time). Then it turns off the master bathroom lights and the exhaust fan. Finally, it gives you 10 seconds to leave and then re-enables the motion detector for the next use. You can imagine that there are hundreds of these types of programming entries for even an average sized house.
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For the horse breeding (and I'm paraphrasing here as this is not my strong suit) they can get the horses to go into season twice a year if they control the lighting that the horse sees. Horses grow their coats and naturally change their cycles based on the length of the days. If they can artificially extend the length of the days the horses still think it's time to make some babies LOL. There are masks that the horses can wear that do this, but they are expensive and since they are worn by 1000+ lb animals they tend to get broken. In the barn we have individual control of the lights in each stall. Each light is colored to match sunlight and allows us to control the extended 'daylight' in each stall individually. We'll have a page programmed in the control system to allow them to select which stalls they want to have extended daylight in. With that control we will then tell the lighting control system to leave those lights on after dusk and for how long. With the fade controls we can then create an artificial sunset and fade to night time at whatever time the client wants.

With foaling happening year round (and any time of day) and two of the families being heavily involved in that process they'll be able to turn on the barn lights from anywhere on property whether that be from a lighting keypad, touch panel or their phones.

That's it for your lighting 101 class :D
 

Done-it-again

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Great, after looking at what is possible and the cool stuff that is being done here. This will cost more than the new home... I'm not a techie guy but I do like some of it..

loving the updates......
 

GreenEnergy28

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And here I was all proud of some old hand me down Sonos hubs I picked up last week so I can link my garage stereo to my backyard....
Top notch work man! End result is going to be bad ass.
 

OLDRAAT

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The owner of that compound must be a tech guy himself IMO.
Incredible work.
 

Taboma

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I applaud your (Your company's) excellent design considerations, pre-planning, beautiful workmanship and your most enjoyable, extremely professional project tutorial 👍👍👍👏
 

Done-it-again

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Probably 6-8 months to substantial completion. 😬


thanks man, he definitely likes the tech stuff though they aren’t in that industry. 👍
Did you know that this project would take this long? I would imagine pricing the labor in this for the amount of time, is like shooting in the dark in the beginning..
 

paradise

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Did you know that this project would take this long? I would imagine pricing the labor in this for the amount of time, is like shooting in the dark in the beginning..
We did expect it to take this long, I was originally budgeting 2 full years but the project has actually moved along quicker. Luckily we tend to do larger projects on the AV side (the other half of our company does business IT support) so we had a decent idea what to expect. There have definitely been companies that lose doing this kind of work as these have to be bid so different from a traditional house where you're in and out.

We're at 1649 man hours right now and we were fortunate to farm out the cable pulling to the GC (big discount on the proposal as I don't have the 'grunt' manpower for this much wiring). Even knowing the expected duration and trying to bid accordingly, between the manpower costs and duration of the job you might not make as much per month as a small job. That said, we love the family we're working for, this is a great 'feather in our cap' (I like jobs with an "Oh Wow" and it's the scale on this one) and we're extremely proud to be doing the work. Long story short, it's a 100% win in my book :D
 
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