All Articles Tagged Neato

Arlen Schweiger | 05/10 09:21 AM, 1 Comment

It would be one thing if the owner of this Southern California home could blame his closet wiring mess on the San Andreas Fault. But unfortunately, it was the fault of the original installation company that the owner needed to call on another CE pro to check out why his low-voltage panel doors wouldn’t close. The client found San Diego-based Audio Impact as a referral from another of the integrator’s customers, and the tidiness of this result will likely earn more referral calls. When system designer Ryan Lipkovicius of Audio… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 03/01 10:14 AM, 4 Comments

This New Jersey client’s dream home was three years in the making, two trips to CEDIA Expos in the technology planning and nearly one electrical surge from potential disaster. Thanks to the project’s meticulous design, wiring and power protection planning from integrator Home Theater of Long Island (HTOLI) of Manhasset, N.Y., all cylinders are still firing smoothly. And there are tons of cylinders firing in this massive integration success. The residence features 50 zones of distributed audio, which covers three buildings and a custom outdoor integrated speaker solution covering a… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 02/29 06:28 AM, 6 Comments

Oh what fun it is to mock structured wiring cabinets, equipment racks and entertainment centers that have lost their way! But I’m willing to bet that half of CE Pros have wiring demons in their own closets. Take mine, for example. The structured wiring was pristine when my integrator installed it six years ago. The A/V rack was gorgeous, too, with everything beautifully labeled and organized and … working. Since then, though, I’ve swapped out equipment, rearranged some things, completely shut down components, and switched from POTS to cable telephone,… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 02/09 09:18 AM, 0 Comments

This 10,000-square-foot home has 11 flat-panel TVs, 54 speakers, more than 20 zones of audio and a dozen video zones, an Elan g! system to control everything … and four racks displayed in a beautiful custom cabinet as almost a shrine to the high-tech prowess. They’re sitting pretty on the wall of a well-done media room that features a 106-inch motorized drop-down screen. “Originally we were going to have standalone racks in the utility room, but the homeowner invested a lot of money and wanted to see the gear,” says… View this story

CE Pro Editors | 01/26 01:02 PM, 0 Comments

For Tom Walker and Mark Jahnigen of Wired Home Automation Services in East Petersburg, Pa., the invitation to contribute to an Extreme Makeover: Home Edition renovation in the nearby Newberry Township amounted to a leap of faith. “We knew next to nothing about the family until after we committed to the job,” Walker says, “and even then all we knew were the limitations we had to work with.” The goal was to provide not only a more accessible home for 24-year-old Brian Keefer, who was paralyzed from the neck down… View this story

Steven Castle | 11/04 07:25 AM, 6 Comments

Tom Redhead and Sean Sullivan, formerly of the electronics design and installation firm AVI Design by Audio Warehouse in Saskatchewan, Canada, and now operators of their own CE firm, SuRe InnoVations in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, certainly had their hands full - of cabling, components, you name it - with this palatial space. The home theater and lobby were designed by North Miami, Fla.-based First Impressions Theme Theatres in grand fashion: an ear-splitting JBL Synthesis sound system, a jaw-dropping 155-inch Screen Innovations display fed by a Runco projector, a whole-house digital audio… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 09/21 07:07 AM, 2 Comments

What do you get when you add up two 7.1-channel surround-sound rooms, three 5.1 surround rooms, 12 zones of audio and a request to have all the wire hidden among an 18,000-square-foot log cabin? Well, eventually more than 50,000 feet of cable running from a centralized rack system to 136 Cat 6 drops, 14 coax drops, 15 multi-mode fiber locations and enough 12- and 14-gauge wire to accommodate the speakers. The cabling length is a rough estimate, but because of the obstacles that come with outfitting a log cabin of… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 08/04 09:09 AM, 2 Comments

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Central Coast Audio Visual was originally brought into this project to replace four outdoor televisions, and its “Neat-O” work and professional work ethic led to a whole-house retrofit project. Regarding the outdoor TVs, the original integrator had installed standard TVs, and over a year’s span in the sunny Southern California climate every one of them had failed, says CCAV owner Chris Wilson. So the seed of this project was their replacement with SunBriteTV all-weather displays. “At this point we thought our project was over,” Wilson notes. But… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 07/08 08:53 AM, 20 Comments

You would expect everything in a new $2 million home to be spic ’n span, but this British Columbia, Canada, residence was left with some electrical work that looked more like a child wired it than a professional contractor. Compared with the low-voltage done on the neighbors’ house, it’s easy to see why installer Beyond Audio was called on to patch things up. It was the Kelowna, B.C.-based integrator that had wired the neighboring home, and when that owner saw this mess, “our client insisted this owner call us,” says… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 06/10 06:48 AM, 0 Comments

Each year our sister publication Electronic House’s Home of the Year Awards allows us to view some of your most incredible projects. We had so much fun going through the entries to pluck out four fully stocked, but super tidy, equipment racks and mechanical rooms for our last Neat-O column that we decided to go for an encore. Photos: Best Racks of HOTY We've rounded up another quartet of fine rack installs controlling sophisticated systems. Click here for 4 Gorgeous Racks. Congratulations to these Home of the Year entries for… View this story