A few things I learned from electrical was:
- Any outdoor lights *now* require sensors included. Porter Davis says this is a 'regulatory' requirement, but also say that after you move in you can do whatever you want! I think it's odd there would be a regulation forcing you to have a sensor for outdoor lighting, when the alternative is to have no lighting at all, doesn't make sense. The sensors they provide are huge, very ugly and cost more than $150 each (on top of the cost of the light). You can use one sensor for a number of lights, however.
This is just the closest looking one I could find on Google. The way the cable comes out is similar, but PD's is grey and larger. - The alternative to the above is to have them do the cabling and leave a junction box where you want to put your own light later, which is what we did for a each 'side' ('left' and 'right) on our house. Obviously getting a sparky in later will cost a bit more, but overall I think the cost will balance out by not using PD's overpriced sensors AND we will avoid using sensors that look like they belong in the original War of the Worlds.
- Under cupboard lights are $130 each, and look like below, though I believe there is another option. We chose to have two, one in the middle of the bench on each side of the rangehood.
Under cupboard lighting for the kitchen. Approx $130 each. - It is quite cost effective and easy to get two-way switches. For example, we got an outdoor light (well, junction box) put on the exterior wall of the house on the garage side. It will turn on with a switch from the rear garage door or from the laundry.
- You can request a four power points on one plate, rather than having two doubles next to each other. However, the quad-plate is quite beefy and I can't say I'd really appreciate seeing that on a wall. We did put one in the theater room and one in the living room, though, where TV units etc should conceal them.
- They won't let you put a powerpoint on the end of the island bench where the drawers are. They say there is insufficient space. When we built with Burbank this wasn't a problem, so not sure why Porter Davis differs.
- It would have cost a little over $1000 to have 4 point data cabling done. I can do this myself for much, much cheaper and I didn't need or want four points in any event. But I would suggest even an after-market sparky may be able to do this cheaper, if you lay down the ground work first (cut holes in plaster, have cables ready in roof etc. Remember that data cabling is not dangerous, so you can safely terminate it yourself if you cared to do so. I'm also wondering what the effects of the NBN rollout may be in terms of connecting my internet router to the NBN box, as Traralgon is *supposed* to have started rollout already, I think...
- You can have cabling for projectors or wall-mounted TVs done by Porter Davis but, again, it's not cost effective if you have some nouse to do it yourself. We are thinking of getting a projector in the theater room eventually, so we got them to put in a power point in the roof. However, I plan on running a draw string/cable and pre-drilling the noggins myself at the rough-in stage, which will make pulling through HDMI cables later an easy affair.
- The staff, while friendly, don't really make a whole heap of suggestions, so be sure to think about things you might want before you go in, and ask plenty of questions about it. Likewise, the staff know how to use the electrical schematic program ('Clipsec') but I doubt they have any understanding of the actual recommendations when it comes to data cabling etc (like keeping the data cables from running parallel to electrical cabling, where possible, unless shielded).
