When people picture Crestron home automation they think of touch panels and keypads, but the part that decides whether a system is reliable is the rack. The house in these photos, finished in March 2021, has a grand marble hall and a TV beside the garden doors, and the photos of its rack show what careful wiring looks like.
A rack in three layers
The top of the rack is the brain and the network: a Crestron control processor resting on a Cisco SG350-28P, a 28 port gigabit switch that can also power devices over their network cables. The middle holds the sources and streaming, a Sky box and a Sonos unit. Lower down come the amplification and the AV receiver: a Crestron audio unit with line and room outputs, and an Anthem MRX 720.
Every run coded by colour
Seen from the back, nothing is loose. Orange, yellow, blue and pink cables travel in their own bundles, each held with hook and loop straps that open again without cutting when a new device joins. A colour for each type of run means anyone working on the rack later can see at a glance which bundle goes where.
The rooms it serves
The rooms in the photos include the hall, with its sweeping marble staircase, iron balustrade and long crystal chandelier, and a room where a TV hangs beside glazed doors onto a paved terrace.
Planning Crestron home automation for your home
Pick the location of the rack at the design stage and treat its cupboard as a room in its own right: it needs ventilation, a clean power supply and cable routes from every part of the house. Specify the network switch with as much care as the processor, and leave empty rack space and spare cables for later additions. Crestron sets out its home platform on its Crestron Home page.
Our Crestron, home automation, whole home audio and Wi-Fi pages explain the options, and our survey and design page shows how we plan a house.
Photos: the hall, the TV and the rack
More finished rooms are in our Gallery.
Planning a smart home in Dublin or Cork?
Send us your plans and tell us what you would like the house to do, and we will design the system, the network and the rack as one. Get in touch, or ring 01 906 9326 in Dublin or 021 202 8107 in Cork.
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