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 We have a
set of wireless speakers we carry between
the back deck and the pool depending on where we are at the
time. I've even used them downstairs and in the garage from
time to time.
They're ok, but sometimes a
little flaky. That's when I threaten to wire up some old
speakers and connect them to the stereo. That would be fine
for downstairs, but not the deck.
So we ordered some outdoor
speakers and a whole bunch of in wall speaker wire. Here we go
on another project adventure.
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 First step is putting
a hole in our half wall for the speaker wire jacks. This part
was a little odd. We spent so much time building the wall. I
felt bad cutting a hole into it.
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 The truly difficult
part was getting a hole up from the bottom. The first obstacle
was a large piece of furniture downstairs that I didn't want
to move for easy access to the floor above. The second
difficulty was drilling through two 2 x 4"s and 3/4" subfloor
to get inside the wall .
As you can see, I
managed.
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 Next step was pull out the switches and
box at the sliding glass doors to put in a volume control for
the speakers outside. Currently there's a switch for
the overhead kitchen light and one for the flood lights
outside. We're adding the volume control, and since the wall
was all torn up anyway, a porch light/switch for the
deck. | |
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 After lots of thought
and consideration, we decided to run the speaker wire through
the sofet, into the attic, down the inside of an interior
wall, across the basement ceiling and back up the wall next to
the door for the volume control. Surprisingly that only
took 52 feet of wire.
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 Though it did get
stuck going up the wall to the volume control. I couldn't push
it up any further or pull it back down, so I had to cut a hole
and make it unstuck
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 I took this shot after stapling the
wire around 3pm. It was nearly 90 degrees outside and well
above 120 in the attic. Tearing up all the insulation I
put down last fall was
annoying, but it goes back easy.
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 This is the box for the new outside
light. Jen and I had an argument over how high the light
should be. I thought for sure it should go at the top of the
door. She said lower - almost eye level . After cutting the hole
then driving to Lowes to get a light, I noticed most
houses have porch lights at eye level. Hmmmm.
The
plastic tubing is the wiring for the flood lights. It's ugly.
Really ugly. It will go away eventually. Unfortunately I had
already started to many simultaneous projects to do that
too.
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 It got
late and I didn't get anywhere near as close to done as I
would have liked. Since I've leaving next weekend for the UK
and not sure if I'll complete it during the week, I
temporarily put the old switches back in, so we could turn on
the power and have light in the kitchen.
I wonder what
the dog walkers think when they come in after
each weekend to find the house torn up one way or another
and different each time.
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 January 25, 2009 I finally get back to this project.
Above when I say I temporarily put the switches and wiring back,
I didn't mean 6+ months. My temporary fix was cutting the back
of the box out so I could mount the switches quickly and
temporarily.
Six months is entirely too long to expose wiring and switches
to bare insulation.
You can see if you look close in the picture above the
insulation through the box behind the wires.
That's bad.
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 I got the real box (with a back), all the wires and
some of the switches back together.
We added a split switch to power the two different back
porch lights. We have the new single bulb light (need to get a
picture of that) and these 500W flood light thingies. The
split switch was perfect for that.
The middle (three way) switch is the light over the kitchen
table.
The empty mess on the right is the reason I started this
whole thing. That's where the outdoor speaker volume control
will go. Some of my wires were too short and the control was a
real pain in the ass. I left it as is, since the wires
don't have any juice in them and don't present a (real)
fire hazard. As long as I get back and finish it before deck
season, everything should be cool.
The hole on the left is where I moved the entire box away
from the trim. We'll patch that eventually too. |
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 June 14, 2009 - Is this an every 6 months
project? Anyway, I get around to finally wiring the
volume switch into our switch box at the sliding glass
doors. Wasn't quite as difficult as I had first
expected.
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 Once the wiring was all connected, I threw up
the speaker. They went up fast and easy. Fire up the
stereo and see what happens...
The stereo has two speaker outputs - A & B. A are
the primaries, B are obviously the secondaries. When I
wired up some old speakers downstairs into the B arena
over the winter there were some interesting affects. To
run both A & B at the same time, you had to crank up
the volume; otherwise they ran ok independantly of each
other.
With the new outdoor speakers wired into the B arena
things changed some more. While trying to run both A
& B at once, the A's don't run at all and the
exterior volume control barely works enough to get the
B's to work. Maybe I needed to turn the stereo volume up
more? Running them independant of each other works
fine.
So now I can have either outdoor or indoor, but not
both.
Sounds like I need a new receiver, hence the title of
this project "Whole House Stereo" I
guess. |
Continued here. |
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