The phone rings. It’s a general contractor, or maybe an electrician, excited about a new build. “Got a set of plans coming your way,” he says. “Customer wants seven TV locations, audio out by the pool, a Wi-Fi network, maybe lighting control and shades, all under one system. You can put a price together for that, right?”
Sure. I can put a price together for just about anything. But I always ask a few questions first, such as what he actually wants that network to cover, whether anyone’s streaming music outside, how many people typically stay over. And that’s usually where the conversation gets a little tense. “I don’t know, man, we just gave you the details. What else do you need to know?”
Twenty-plus years in this business, and I still haven’t found a way to make that answer short. So let’s have the long version here instead of on the phone.
The Part of Your House You’ll Actually Use
Think about what you’ll touch today in your own home. You’ll walk on the floors, sit in a chair, sleep in a bed that happens to rest on those floors. Your electrical system will keep you cool in July and warm in January, and you won’t think about it once.
Then there’s the electronics. You’ll use them to check the weather before you decide what to wear, see who’s in the driveway, put music on while you make coffee, unlock the door for a delivery you weren’t home for, watch the game after dinner, video call your kid at college, and check the cameras before you fall asleep. And at some point, you’ll raise your voice at a device that cannot, in fact, hear you better if you yell. I’d put the electronics in your home in the top three things you engage with all day, every day. I’d actually argue they’re number one. You will use your home’s electronics to inform your day, relax at the end of it, and stay connected to the people you love more than you’ll use anything else in the house. And yet when the plans for a new home go out to the trades for pricing, this is the one category nobody wants to slow down or plan for.
You don’t have to have a “smart home” to have a connected one, either. Your house could be running on nothing more than the modem-router combo your internet provider dropped off, and you’d still be connected through every laptop, phone, TV, and kid’s tablet under your roof. How well that connection works quietly decides how a lot of your days start and end. Most people don’t notice that until it stops working.
The Treadmill Story
A few years back, when I was still a lead technician in the field with my brothers, our manager, CD Hathaway, told us on the way to a call that we weren’t going to believe what the customer was about to say, and that he was going to let the customer say it himself.
We get there, and the homeowner tells us, “When I turn my treadmill on, my Wi-Fi stops working.”
My brothers and I looked at each other. Your Wi-Fi just stops. When you turn on a treadmill. “Yep,” he said.
So we went downstairs, pulled up a 4K video, made sure we had a strong pull on the internet, and let it stream. Ran clean. Then I got on the treadmill and turned it on.
The video stopped.
CD about lost it laughing, let out a couple of words I won’t repeat here, and told us good luck. If anybody could figure it out, it was us.
It took some digging, but we found it. An electrician had run a new power line for that circuit at some point, directly parallel to the network cable feeding the house. Enough interference off that power line was stomping the Wi-Fi signal every time that circuit came alive. We reran the network line away from the power feed, the way it should have been done in the first place, and the problem disappeared.
Here’s why I tell you that story. It wasn’t a Wi-Fi problem. It wasn’t even really a treadmill problem. It was one cable run too close to another, years earlier, by somebody who had no reason to think it mattered. The ripple effect showed up as a grown man standing on a treadmill wondering why his internet hated him.
If you’re upstairs watching the game and your wife turns the treadmill on downstairs, and you miss the last five seconds because the stream drops, that’s not bad luck. That’s a small decision from years ago finally showing up in your living room. We can’t catch every one of those before it happens. But after twenty-some years of chasing these things down in crawlspaces and attics, I can tell you that detailed conversations and the right questions catch a lot more of them than people expect.
Why We Can’t Just Quote Your Plans Like Everyone Else Does
Here’s the part that trips people up. When an electrician looks at a set of plans and sees 120 drops, 60 lights, and 60 outlets, there’s almost nothing left to ask. Maybe a style or a finish color, but that’s already on the plans. Five bathrooms means five toilets and five flanges. The floor guy prices it by the square foot. The roofer prices it by the roof. Code decides most of it before anyone opens their mouth.
Low-voltage doesn’t work that way, and it’s not because we’re being difficult. It’s because almost nothing about it is required. There’s no code that says you need a full-range speaker system by the pool, or a mesh point at the end of the dock, or a camera on the boathouse. Every one of those is your call, not the building department’s.
Picture walking into a car dealership and telling the salesman exactly what you want. Leather seats. A sunroof. A serious sound system. Heated seats. All-wheel drive. “Give me a price,” you say. He disappears into the back and comes out carrying a box. Just the parts. A sunroof panel, a stack of leather, a subwoofer. No car. That’s what it sounds like to us when someone hands over a list, seven TVs, four zones of audio, a Wi-Fi network, and expects a number back with no further conversation. You’ve described the parts you want. Nobody’s mentioned the car they have to live inside of yet. That car, in a home, is the network. It’s the thing everything else depends on, and it’s the one thing that never shows up on a set of architectural plans.
That’s also why the price swings so widely once you actually start talking numbers. A mid-range electrical outlet costs six bucks. A nice one costs twenty. Either way you’re under thirty dollars, and you’ll never notice the difference except in the bathroom mirror. A pair of decent background speakers runs six or seven hundred dollars. A pair that can actually throw a party runs fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, and three-way full range doubles that again. Turn the good pair on for a buddy and he tells you, “I feel like I’m at a concert.” That same kind of gap shows up in cars too, the difference between a 1986 Honda Accord with four hundred thousand miles on it and a brand new one off the lot, or further up the ladder, a Mercedes S500 next to an S500 with the full AMG package. Every one of those cars gets you to the store just fine. Which one you pick just tells you something about what you’re actually after.
Six People, Six Houses, Same Blueprint
Let’s make this real. Say you’re building your dream home. Five thousand square feet, on the water, with a dock, a pool, a guest house, and a garage. Look at those plans and ask yourself one question: where do you absolutely have to have a strong Wi-Fi signal?
Put five or six different homeowners in front of that same set of plans and you’ll get five or six completely different answers. These aren’t the only ones out there, just the ones I hear all the time.
One will say, “This is my relaxation property. I don’t want to be reachable here. Give me just enough Wi-Fi to run the HVAC and leave it at that.”
Another will say, “I want it everywhere, from the second I pull in the driveway to the second I untie the boat from the dock. I want the boat pulling its updates from my home network. I don’t want a dead spot anywhere on this property, inside or out.”
A third will look at you like you’ve lost your mind. “Why would I want Wi-Fi on the dock? Isn’t that where I go to disconnect?”
A fourth doesn’t trust wireless at all. “I want Wi-Fi in the house because I have to, but everything that matters gets hardwired. Cat6 to every room.”
A fifth just wants it simple. “A mesh system. That’s it. Nothing fancy.”
And a sixth doesn’t care about any of that. “I don’t care what any of this costs. I just want whatever wires you put in my walls to still be just as good in fifty years as they are today.”
None of those answers is wrong, and this list isn’t even close to the whole range. But there’s no version of this where you can look at a floor plan and know which of these homeowners you’re building for. That’s not a knock on the general contractor or the electrician. It’s not their job to know that. It’s the reason this conversation has to happen at all, and it’s the conversation that far too often gets forgotten about altogether, pushed off until the end, or worse than forgotten, just quietly undervalued.
Why We Ask Before We Quote
This is the part I want to leave you with. We are never going to hand you a price before we understand which of those homeowners you are, because unlike sheetrock or wiring outlets, this whole category lives in the space between what’s required and what you actually want out of your day. Get that wrong, and you don’t find out until you’re standing in a finished house wondering why the Wi-Fi drops the second you step onto the dock, or why the network nobody asked you about isn’t anything close to what you pictured when you signed the contract.
That gap, between what gets requested and what actually gets understood, is where the real cost of this industry hides. It’s also exactly why we build a conceptual design before we ever price a job. So we find out which homeowner you are before the walls close up, not after.
Next time, I want to tell you about a house I drove out to a few years back. I had a feeling something was wrong before I ever saw the place, just from the road I was driving down, and I was right by the time I pulled into the driveway. It’s still one of the more sobering days I’ve had in this business, and it’s a good example of what happens when nobody has the conversation we just had.
For now, if you’re planning a build and you’re not sure which of those homeowners you are, that’s fine. That’s what the walkthrough is for. Stop by the office in White Stone, call, or text. No pressure, no sales pitch. We’ll ask the questions so you don’t have to guess.
Skip Emminizer, CEO
Bay Audio Video
Where Tech is Done Right so you can Live Life Well
804-480-0873
BayAudioVideo.com
