New House, What to wire for a projector

You should get plenty of input.

A conduit is a great idea.

To start, you will want HDMI. I use the monoprice 22 AWG version.

You might consider a powerbridge in case you want to plug your pj into a conditioner and/or UPS at some point.

You can never go wrong with several runs of cat5e or cat6 - it can be used for quite a few purposes.

RS232 is a considertation if you go wired for remote.

Doubling up some rafters might be nice for flexilibity in mounts.

I wonder if you could have them do a drop ceiling in a section (done neatly layed out etc so it flows with the room. Then you can have access anytime you want. I did this in my HT room in my basement, I just have to buy the tile, then I will post some pics, but its gonna look good, with plenty of accessibility etc.

I agree that drop-in ceiling is clearly the best. That is also what I have.

My advice is different. Run good HDMI cable with enough length to reach wherever you might ever mount a projector & running to wherever you will be putting your receiver, cable box, etc., and put in a second HDMI for a spare. Put in one good 110 v power cord with outlet plug, (not just an extension cord), to your projector position (with slack to move it when you mount a new projector 6 ft. away), and another 110 v. power cord to your screen position, in case you ever want a motorized screen.
Run speaker wires through your ceiling and down the walls between studs to every place you might ever want to place a speaker, and now you're done. Oh, and some projectors have a 12v. trigger to control a motorized screen, so you run a wire from your expected projector position to your expected screen position, too. Probably, though, you are mounting your screen while building up the room, so whatever it needs will be taken care of.

You (just) get a receiver that up-converts all your sources to HDMI, so you won't ever need component cable or any other video cable. Get all your cable from Monoprice, because its good and still inexpensive.

Conduit is an ideal solution, but a little expensive. I seriously doubt you would need or want any other cable in your ceiling, and as this post indicates, you will want wires going from here to there and there and there, so conduit everywhere is not very practical.

I know this sounds archaic, but wire a composite cable as well as some receivers don't display menu's over HDMI. I bought a marantz unit and I didn't run composite or componet to the projector (just VGA for my laptop and hdmi for everything else) and I have no way of getting to the receiver's on screen display.

Conduit is not expensive. Under $100 for most runs in rooms your size and definitely helps for future proofing your installation, HDMI might not be around forever. Also, MINIMUM - 1 HDMI, 1 Component, 1 Composite, 2 Cat6.

Bob

Cat6 can be converted to a myriad of formats/uses, some of which we know about now and some we don't yet know about. If you ahve an yeasy to use conduit, you will be set.

Some people run a pair of home-run Cat5/6 cables to every room in the house when building new. Can be used for everything form network to speakers to HDMI with baluns.

You might take a look at the home automation forum here.

With all the HDMI issues even with good cable, dual cat6 can be used with Baluns for HDMI or ther types of connections and has less problems at longer distances. At 1080P resolution and soon higher resolutions many longer HDMI cable will likely have probles in the future.

Bob

I am having a house built as well with the bonus room above the garage as well. I could never decide where the screen, PJ and components would be so I opted for an electrical outlet above the ceiling. I have access to my bonus room from the her's closet in the master bedroom so I will run and drop cables with relative ease. My builder (Toll Brothers) would not allow us to run our own wires....insurance and they mentioned sometimes the electrical crew clips the wires as they should be installing the wires and getting paid for it.

--JK

For the conduit where you are going to put the video cables, I would ask them to leave a pull string in the conduit, so you can pull you own cables through later.

I would ask for large (3") conduit. The cables are not that thick, but the connectors can be large, and if you use smaller conduit, you might not be able to put the connectors through.

I would also consider VGA, in addition to HDMI, preinstalled. With VGA, you have the option of adding a HT PC later, if you want. Anything else can do done with HDMI (at least right now).

BTW, if you ever do need to pull wires through the conduit, they sell special lubricant to help pull wires through conduit. It makes it much easier, especially if you have some bends in the conduit. The more bends, the harder it is to pull wires though conduit.

When we remodeled, we had the builder put in a large and smaller conduit from the closet to the back of our tv. Most of my gear is in the closet, and I pull all the wires I needed from the TV to the closet.

Randy