Smart Home Wiring Guide: Cat6, Conduit, and Prewire Best Practices

Cat6 cable supports speeds up to 10 Gbps and is the baseline for any modern smart home. Every room should have at least two Cat6 runs — one for network and one for AV or control. High-demand rooms like home theaters, offices, and main gathering spaces should have four or more. Cat6 is affordable during prewire (roughly the cost of the cable and labor) but prohibitively expensive to add after walls are closed.

Conduit (smurf tube) runs alongside your cables give you a pathway to pull new wires in the future without cutting drywall. Run conduit from a central distribution point to every major room, especially to TV locations and potential future equipment spots. Conduit turns a future technology change from a construction project into a simple cable pull.

Every cable in a smart home should home-run back to a single central distribution panel — not daisy-chained from room to room. This star topology makes troubleshooting easy, supports any future equipment change, and ensures every device has a clean, dedicated path back to the network core.

Choose a cool, dry, accessible location for your central equipment rack early in the design process. All home-run cables terminate here. Plan for power, ventilation, and enough physical space for switches, amplifiers, and controllers. A closet near the center of the home is ideal for keeping cable runs short.