Michael Holigan: How would you like to have video distribution and phone service throughout your whole house? I mean, what if they're watching downstairs on the VCR and entertainment center? You can watch at the same time on your TV upstairs in your bedroom. Same with phone lines. You could have Internet access in any room in your house. Well, it all starts with the process known as structured wiring. You need to do that before you put in the insulation and you put up the drywall. But if you do it upfront, it's very inexpensive. We're in a about a 2,500 square foot house. All of the wiring in this house for video and phone lines, less than $1,000. Is that a deal or what? We'll start here with the normal electrical Romex that we have on this side of the stud. It goes down to the normal plug-in box that we have here at the base. On this side of the stud though, we have what's special. Here we have what's known as category five, the screen wire. It's got our phone lines inside it so we can use a fax, normal telephone, modem line for the Internet. This is known as RG6 Quad Shield. Now this is a line that we're distributing our video on. It could be cable, could be satellite, or like I said, it could be the VCR downstairs and we're watching the picture upstairs on the television. It all starts at the head-end equipment. We've got that downstairs in the closet. Let's run take a look. Well this is our head-end panel here in the master closet, and as you can see, there's a lot of wires and cables coming through here. The red and white stuff is for security and then here we have our category five that we were talking about, and our RG6 Quad Shield. Now this is for our video distribution and all of our phone lines throughout the whole house. Even though it's low voltage, these guys have come in and wired it just like it was a high voltage panel. We know we're not gonna have a problem. Now this is a home run setup. Everything starts here. It goes out to all of our boxes, all of our controls, and then it comes back here. Now if you daisy chained it the way you might an electrical system, if you have a problem with one outlet you might have a problem with all the outlets on that circuit. With it being a home run style, the signals going where if you have a problem with one you'll know which one, but not the rest of them. It'll stay up and working. So it's a really nice system to have. Here's a sample of our RG6 Quad Shield. As you can see, this is where all of our video service is gonna come through throughout the whole house and this is our cat five. You put it up here you can see we've got four pairs of phone lines in here so we can have four different lines running at any one time. This might be a fax, a modem and then two phone lines. If you look real closely you can see they have different twist rates. The reason for that is the sound can interfere with each other if you didn't...if they were all the same twist rate, if you've ever been on the telephone you've heard someone else's voice, well that could happen. If you use different twist rates, or the number of turns per inch in this line, then you're gonna be okay and it's gonna be protected. Well that's what they do with cat five. Really good system. So's the RG6 for video. Great system to use. Now this isn't the way it finishes, of course. You gotta hook it up to something. Here's what we've got. Here's for our video equipment, and as you can see, a digital satellite, out to receivers. We've got data in, data out for our phone lines. Over here we've got all types of data lines that we can put in here. Let's go take a look at one that's totally complete. Well this is what the head-end equipment looks like once it's totally done and instead of a bunch of loose cables in here you see everything's actually plugged in where it belongs. And all of this equipment came from OnQ and you don't have to buy all of it to begin with. You need to go ahead and have a structured wiring run throughout your house, but just add the actual components as you need them. You may wonder why are there so many RG6 lines in here; how many television sets can you have? Well remember, this is a home run system. We're actually sending the signal out to a television set or to a component and then bringing it back. They're not all in a circuit because if we have a problem with one we don't wanna mess up the rest of the house. So each one goes out and comes back. Same with telephone lines. Data for the Internet uh, normal handheld phone, or a fax machine, we send it out and we come back. We don't have it on a circuit. Now we have different components for different parts of the house as well. We have a home entertainment where we have all of the video and audio equipment, but we might wanna distribute that picture on that television set and entertainment center to a different room on the house. We can do that with this system. It'll go out, grab the picture off that television set, bring it back in, send it to a different part of the house. Same thing with uh, our Internet service. We may wanna hook in in different rooms in the house. We can bring a ISDN line or DSL line into our circuit here and then plug in to any room in the house and we're gonna have high speed Internet access and it's great for the home office because we have fax machines, we have telephones and we have high speed Internet access, plus we have audio in there so we can watch cable or satellite television in there as well. Very nice system. Not too expensive if you do it in pieces. Get your structured wiring in the house while it's under construction. Add your components as you need them. You don't have to pay for everything up front, just add it as you need it. And it's very easy to use as well. Let's take a look at a switch. Now even though this looks like a security keypad, it's actually a lot more than that. It controls lighting, heating and air conditioning and security, so we don't have a lot of different switches in the wall. We just have one control panel here. Security, you just press number two and your security system's on. If you're leaving, going away, you press "away" and all the motion sensors come on. You have a night setting or a day setting, depending on how you want the security, just outside or if you want the motion detectors on inside as well. Temperature controls, you just pop number five. It'll show you the degrees in a different part of the house. You can go up and down with it or you can actually just set in the actual degrees that you want the temperature to be. Events, for your lighting controls, just press number seven and let's say you have a party. You might have a party setup already programmed in here where every light inside and outside the house comes on, or let's say you wanna dim everything except just in the entertainment center. That might be a different setting. You just hit it here, it shuts down everything. You don't have to go from room to room turning on and off switches, even though they are there if you wanna do it that way as well. A very easy to control system and the security has a lot of other features in this house as well. Since we can distribute video throughout the house, we have one extra security feature. We have a camera out at the front entryway. When someone rings the doorbell it doesn't matter what television set we're at, we can turn on that camera and see who's out there before we ever get up. Now remember, you don't have to get all these features to begin with, but you do need to get that structured wiring run throughout the house while your home is under construction. It'll never be cheaper than while your home is under construction. Then add any components you like as you budget allows.