New to me house, what to install?

[ericmark]

Three levels, bottom one not front to back, want internet throughout house, the LAN over power is non starter I am a radio ham and will not even consider fitting those things, they should be banned.

So in old house router in front bedroom and LAN cable to back living room to a Lidi booster unit so from either or whole house covered by wifi. Will be taking this with me.

Desk top and TV's seem to work better with hard wired, phones, laptops, and tablets using wifi. There is also hard wire to hub which in turn uses some form of wifi to work sockets, lights and TRV plus an energy monitor.

I have at least two switches, maybe three, so would assume need a reel of 4 pair cable and put in some wiring while house is devoid of clutter.

However I remember years ago wiring up telephones, double sockets throughout the house one direct and other from fax machine so when a fax was detected it would auto turn off phones, so fax had better signal, however today all redundant, don't think I have used a fax this century, it was after all a 19th century invention, actually invented before Morse code, clever Scotsman who like most of the clever Scotsmen left Scotland.

But point is what should I install? Wife says she wants automation with curtains closing and opening etc, however son fitted LAN cables throughout his house with massive server in loft, with an outlet by every radiator to work the TRV, however all TRV heads are wireless so the sockets are redundant already.

So ideas please.

 

[SpecialK]

For the WIFI I would install ubiquiti or tp-link eap wifi access points hard wired back to a switch and powered via POE. Put them on the ceilings of every level? Hard wiring behind TV's and desktop computers and for some form of media centre in a cupboard somewhere?

Hard wires TRV's will be cheaper and wont need batteries changing but you will need some form of controller for them.

If you can get neutrals to the light switches that will allow installing various smart switches possible.

 

[IT Minion]

Nothing beats hard wired connections.

If you go for a mesh WiFi network that supports an ethernet backhaul then you can get consistent WiFi throughtout and then, when you get time, put in the ethernet to replace the backhaul and improve speeds. Clusters of devices can be connected to the WiFi using access points in the mean time.

I've never heard of hard wired smart TRVs. Learn a new thing every day.

 

[festive]

+1 here for ubiquiti unifi range, i use their AP AC Pro but the Lites are good also. I have 4 of these covering a fairly large area around my house and garden. This is running dual zones for public and private, the public zone being throttled. I can remote access my network at any time using the Ubiquiti Unifi Cloud key which hangs off a POE connection. This is great i can kill any connected device i dont want and monitor all devices and their usage in detail.
Google offer a similar version also.

But these are all interconnected via Cat6a and smart switches with POE throughout.