Overview of the WireTracks Zone System

WireTracks products are designed to enable you to add wiring to a new or existing home at any time in the future. Once installed, simply remove the molding, run new wiring, snap the molding back into place, and you are done. This means you not only solve your immediate problems, but future ones as well.

Many homeowners are installing structured wiring in their homes, but this is not enough as we can only install the wiring that is available today. In the future, this wiring will be obsolete and these new homes will need major remodeling to keep up-to-date. This will not only result in inconvenience for the current homeowner, but will affect the home's resale value as well.

Over time, wiring can also fail, the needs of the homeowner might change, and new technologies will become available. The only way to prepare for this is to install conduit for vertical runs and WireTracks for horizontal runs.

This document describes things to consider when preparing a home for the future by using the WireTracks Zone System to plan for technological changes.

Components of the WireTracks Zone System

Accessible Wiring Area
Ideally, your home will have an attic, crawlspace, or basement which you can use to route wiring between different zones within the home, between the wiring closet and a zone, or from the wiring closet to external utilities.

Central Wiring Closet
The Central Wiring closet will be used to store structured wiring panels, alarm panels, routers, firewalls, cable modems, phone systems, and other equipment. Ideally, all wiring within the house will be home run to this location.

External Utilities Access Point
Centralizing access from external utilities is critical to keeping your home wiring clean. This will prevent cable installers from drilling holes in the side of your house and will make it easy to distribute new wiring throughout the house without major remodeling effort.

Zones
Using WireTracks, you can run wiring between any two points in a house that have connected walls. Each of these areas is called a WireTracks Zone. By planning all WireTracks Zones and linking them to an accessible wiring area through conduit, you will be able to run wiring between any two points within a house.

Putting it all Together

The following graphic shows the floor plan of a three-story, one-bedroom house that has a central wiring closet.

The following graphic shows the floor plan broken into three WireTracks Zones. The red and blue zones are broken apart by the sliding glass door in the breakfast nook, the blue and the yellow zone are broken by the front door, and the red and yellow zones are broken by the garage door. Wiring can be run between any two points within the same zone.

The following graphic shows how to run wiring between point A and point B within the same WireTracks Zone.

The next graphic shows the view of the attic. The red zone, the blue zone, the wiring closet, and external utilities are all connected to the attic through conduit. Because the yellow zone is such a small part of the house, we chose not to run conduit to that area.

The next graphic shows the wiring path from point C to wiring closet aggregation point and from the aggregation point to the external utilities.

The next graphic shows the wiring path connecting point C and point D through the attic.

As you can see, WireTracks simplifies adding new wiring to any part of a house. For more information about installing WireTracks, click Next. To order WireTracks products for your new home, click the Order link. To obtain a sample to present to your builder so WireTracks can be integrated into your new home, send an email request to customer service.