We are building a new house and the wall are still open. Whats the best type of cables to run for a video surveillance system. I been reading that coax seems to be the popular choice. Thank you for your help.
QTechinc
QTechinc welcome to the board.
First of all congratulations on the new house, actually your situation is an installers dream, open walls and so many choices. You are correct, coax cable ( RG59U or RG6 ) is the popular choice for most video surveillance systems but that only takes care of the video signal. If you are going to install CCTV cameras with a composite video output (BNC or RCA Video out) than at each camera location you will need one cable for the video signal and one to bring power to the camera. The power cable can be a 2 conductor 18 or 16 gauge cable. If you wanted to run one cable to take care of both power and video, you might want to look into Siamese cable. It contains an RG59U cable and 2 conductor 18 gauge cable in one jacket, so it makes life easy by just running one cable. The only drawback is that this cable is a little thicker than coax and a bit harder to pull.
These cables should all meet at central location where your digital video recorder and power supply will be located. The central location should be within close proximity to your high speed internet modem or router, so you can take advantage of other DVR features such as web server etc.
However if you are considering an IP camera system or if you have not decide on which type of camera you will be using, the best choice would be to run Cat5e to each camera location. You would still need to run one 2 conductor 18 gauge power cable because not all IP cameras can send power over cat5e ( POE ). In the case that you decide to use conventional CCTV cameras, you can always send video signal thru one of the Cat5e pairs, by using video transceivers that connect on each side of the Cat5e and send video over unshielded 2 conductor cable to distances over 1000Ft.