6 min read
If you are building and are not yet sure whether you want home automation, this is the post for you. There is a short list of things that are cheap to do while the walls are open and painful to do afterwards — and doing them commits you to nothing.
Think of it as leaving the door open. Everything below can be run by your own electrician, on your existing contract, without an integrator involved at all.
1. Run cable to every light switch position
The single most useful thing you can do. In a conventional installation, the switch interrupts the power on its way to the light. In a controlled installation, every lighting circuit runs back to a central point instead, and the switch is just a button telling the system what to do.
Converting the first arrangement to the second after plaster means chasing every switch drop in the house. Running the extra cable now costs cable.
Ask for: each lighting circuit home-run back to a central panel position, plus a data cable to each switch position.
If that sounds like more than you want to commit to, there is a middle option: keep conventional switching but make sure every switch drop has a spare cable back to the board. You lose nothing and you keep the door open.
2. Pick — and cable — a central location
Controllers, network switches and power supplies need somewhere to live. A ventilated cupboard under the stairs, in a utility room or in a plant room is ideal. Not a sealed box in a roof space that hits 45°C by mid-afternoon.
Allow more room than seems necessary. Every project we have been involved in has wanted more space at that position by the end than was planned at the start.
Ask for: power, ventilation, and containment from that point to the rest of the house.
3. Data cable to the obvious places
Cat6 to every television position, every likely wall-panel position, every ceiling where an access point might go, and every external corner where a camera might go. It is cheap on the reel and impossible to retrofit neatly.
Ask for: Cat6 back to the central position from each of those points. Two runs where you are unsure — a spare costs almost nothing and saves a wall later.
4. Power at every camera and gate position
Cameras, gate motors and intercoms all need power as well as data. Deciding their positions later is fine; getting containment to those positions now is what matters.
The one that catches people out is the boundary. A camera on a gate post or a compound corner needs a trench from the house, and a trench across a finished driveway is a genuinely expensive afterthought. If there is any chance you will want cameras at the perimeter, put a duct in while the ground is open.
5. Curtain and blind positions
Motorised curtains need power at the track. A socket above the window line, or a cable stubbed out to it, is trivial during first fix and requires lifting plaster afterwards.
Do this at least in the bedrooms and the main living space, even if motorised curtains are not in the current budget. It is one cable per window.
6. The gate, and the pedestrian gate
Most compounds get a duct to the main gate and forget the pedestrian gate beside it. Then the intercom, the keypad or the strike lock has nowhere to come from.
Ask for: power and data to both, plus a spare duct. Also a duct from the gate back to the house for the intercom — video intercoms need more than a bell wire.
7. Water tank and pump
Worth its own line here, because it is one of the most useful things a Kenyan house can automate and one of the easiest to make impossible later.
If you want to know your tank level from your phone, or stop the pump running dry, the sensor at the tank needs a cable back to somewhere sensible. Tanks are usually on a roof or a tower, and running that cable afterwards means working at height on a finished building.
Ask for: a spare cable from the tank position and from the pump's control position back to the central point, or at least to the nearest distribution board.
8. Backup power and the changeover
If there is an inverter, a generator or solar — now or later — decide early which circuits sit on the backed-up side.
Control equipment, the alarm panel, the router and the network switch should all be on backup. That is what keeps the house responding, the alarm armed and the cameras recording through an outage. Getting those circuits onto the right side of a changeover is straightforward at first fix and awkward afterwards.
Ask for: the central equipment position fed from the backed-up side of the changeover.
9. External and security lighting
Outside lighting is usually specified late and wired as one crude circuit. Split it while you can: approach, perimeter, garden, and any lighting you would want to come on with an alarm event. Separate circuits are what let the system do something intelligent later.
10. Label everything, and photograph the walls
This costs nothing and is the item people thank us for most.
Before the plaster goes on, walk the house with a phone and photograph every wall, ceiling and floor with the cable and conduit exposed. Include something in frame for scale and a note of which room it is.
Two years later, when somebody wants to know whether there is a cable behind that wall — or, more urgently, whether there is one where they are about to drill — those photographs are worth more than any drawing. Keep them somewhere you will still have them.
While you are at it, have every cable at the central position labelled at both ends. An unlabelled bundle of forty identical white cables turns a one-day commissioning into a three-day one, and you will pay for the difference.
Give this list to your electrician
None of the above requires an integrator, a brand decision or a budget. It is cable, containment and a cupboard. If you never install a control system, you have spent a small amount on some spare cable. If you do — this year or in ten years — you will have saved yourself the entire cost of opening the walls again.
The one thing worth adding: have someone look at the drawings before first fix, even briefly. An hour spent reading a lighting layout catches the circuits that will be regretted later, and it is the cheapest hour in the whole project.
If you are building in Nairobi and want that hour, send us the plans. If you are further along and the walls are already closed, the retrofit post covers what is still practical.