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Let's Talk About Building a Home! Home Design, Energy Efficiency, Building Tips, Etc
Posts
Rainwater collection - This is something quickly catching on, it may not benefit you that far north, but the idea is that you entire roof is set up to funnel all the rainwater into an underground collection point, where it's filtered for drinking. Even if you didn't do that, you should design your gutters to water all the plants immediately around the house. And speaking of those plants, planting something thorny beneath windows is a good way to deter thieves...
Air turbines - These are growing in popularity and they make them small enough to attach to your roof like a satelite dish. This won't generate all of you power, but it would help.
Energy Efficiency - using your landscaping. This is pretty basic stuff. You want some type of evergreen tree screening your North side, or wherever your cold air comes from. Then plant some type of deciduous trees on the South side of the house so that you have shade in summer, and as much sunlight as possible during the winter. Also, skylights can be a really effective way to light your home during the day to minimize your energy consumption. Also, your kitchen generates a lot of heat when you are cooking, so placing it in a central part of the house lets you use that heat.
Another thing that I saw that I just thought was cool was an episode of Mancave where they hid a TV in this guys study by putting it behind a large one way mirror. It was very cool.
PLUMBING AND WIRING:
A really great way to keep this simple, manageable, and most importantly fixable is to base your layout around a central pillar of plumbing and wiring. Things like putting your water heater in the basement, then the first floor kitchen directly over that, and then a bathroom above that on the second floor. If you have multiple bathrooms, try to have them share walls.
The same with central air systems. Have your furnace in the basement, and a central shaft going up. Then you can branch out to heat specific locations/rooms.
If your house is going to be large, you'll probably want multiple utility pillars, and then have it all converge in the basement. For example, put all the bathrooms on the far left and far right side of the house; run all the plumbing up and down the sides, then in the ceiling of the basement have the pipes converge to your water heat etc.
It's not overkill. Running telephony and IP over the same cat5 wire (or any two datastreams within the same cable) is possible but not advised, the EM leakage will affect both streams, sometimes significantly.
Within that vein, I would also run 4 RG-6 Coaxial cables from an open, south-east facing roof corner (or mid section with an open, 120 degree line of sight in a southerly direction) to your main panel. This will allow nearly all satellite mini/dish services to be easily available without the problems and ugliness of external cabling. You never know what the future holds.
Also, if you plan on ever having a home theatre system, run cables from a likely install point to several speaker locations in both the walls and ceilings. An ambient household sound system is a beautiful thing, a hot selling point, and an absolute bugger to do after the fact. Even just wiring up the TV room will go a long ways in eliminating cabling clutter.