I've just installed a new TV aerial, sat dish and multiswitch and now I have to look at installing RF (and probably CAT5 as well) into all the rooms.

The house is a new build, so all the interior walls are studded plasterboard. As with most constructions of this type there are wooden 'noggins' at various heights between the vertical wooden beams which mean you cannot simply run a cable top to bottom as there will be a beam in the way.

It seems the only option available is to run it in trunking in a corner and then break out into the boxes. Anybody got any better ideas?

I'm also a little concerned most of the trunking from places like B&Q are a bit unsightly, has anyone come across something that looks better?

In the US, those are called fire blocks or something similar. They are not structural members. They are intended to slow down the spread of fire through walls. As such, you should be able to drill through them without a problem. Obviously, I have no knowledge of UK building code, so there might be something that says you can't do that, but I doubt it.

It's the fact that they are inside the wall, without taking a hammer to the plasterboard I can't think of a way to drill through them without some 6ft long drill bit.

Interestingly, although clearly talking about the same thing, the Wikipedia article for noggins says that they are structural, and doesn't mention the fire thing.


Not without dismantling the wall, though (or, at least, cutting drill-sized holes in the plasterboard/drywall above each noggin, and patching them up again with more plasterboard), which is what Andy was probably hoping to avoid.

Sadly that does seem to be the best option, though. All trunking is ugly. The only other option (if you don't mind playing fast and loose with minimum bend radius requirements) is, if the room is carpeted, feed the cable round under the edge of the carpet between the gripper and the skirting-board. This doesn't deal with up/down cables, though. I got my Ethernet from upstairs to downstairs in a small cavity between the staircase stringer and the wall.

Peter

Often this kind of problem is addressed by routing the wires through a basement/crawlspace or attic space, and then drilling into the stud cavities as needed for individual drops.

The trade also uses long flexible drill bits for bending around corners and into stud bays.

Wikipedia.

Cheers

That is interesting. In reality, you seldom see fire blocks anymore. Occasionally when there's a very high wall. And they were never used for rigidity. Though there's some obvious merit to it, once you put on sheathing (that is, the sheet wood placed on the outside of the home), drywall, or plaster lath, rigidity is not a problem.

In the US, you can get long flexible drill bits. Since he's coming through the top plate anyway, he can just continue that hole by using an extra-long drill bit, drill-bit extension, or, potentially, series of drill-bit extensions.

Alternately, if it is wallboard of some nature (as opposed to plaster), repairing holes is really quite easy. Cut your hole cleanly, keep the cutout, get a couple of thin pieces of wood (shims, singles, etc.) and put them through the hole into the wall and screw them to the inside of the wallboard. Then put the cutout back in the hole, screw it to the wood you just put in, spackle, and paint.

I just had a look in the Reader's Digest Complete DIY Manual, and that's essentially what it says to do: make small square holes (about 4in square) wherever your cable route crosses timber, exposing the noggin or stud, then chisel a groove through the timber. Thread the cable and then patch up the holes -- which, as they're all at noggins or studs, won't require any extra noggins.

Peter

Oh, I see. Use the noggin as the member you reattach the patch to. Clever. Though in the US, if the noggin were considered a structural member, notching probably wouldn't be allowed. Holes leave much more rigidity than notches do. Then again, it's not getting a lot of pressure from the side being notched on or the side opposite, so probably not a big deal.

If your house is built anything like mine Andy then you may find there aren't as many noggins as you think, almost all of the walls in my house have no horizontal noggins in place, this means I have been able to knock a small hole behind the skirting and drop a wire down from top to bottom with minimal (but still quite a lot!) of effort.

Forget about feeding cables up the exterior walls, this is way harder than you think. One option could be to run on the outside of the house using black tube trunking, I have used that here for some electrical runs and it seems easy to fit and is cheap.

In your house, I would suggest that getting things into the loft is key, and then drop down the interior studs. Always put more cable in than you expect to use, ie sky plus to every room! pulling up floorboards in a newbuild is stupidly difficult and is best avoided.

Anyway you run new wires requires planning and lots of hard work. You also need the help of a good cable monkey, feeding wires is not something you can do on your own, although SWMBO probably isn't the best person

Another tip, it is one of those jobs that always takes 3 times longer than it will think it will, even when you think you have already factored in 3 times more than you thought you first thought. I spent about a week running in 24 CAT5 points and co-ax to each room. And bear in mind I did used to do that for my living, and I still used trunking for the major run to the loft space from the "server room"

Cheers

Cris.

You need to find a few suitably DIY orientated friends and ply them with free pizza and beers to give you a hand

While SWMBO has been quite useful for many things here, I've belatedly found that a fish tape can be extraordinarily handy when fishing wires through the walls.

Cheers

Fish Bits

edit: You most likely want the self feeding kind.

I would SO come out in the middle of a wall with one of those.

I can't remember whether it was on here or IRL I was having a rant about this recently, so if the former please forgive the repetition, but why is this? It wasn't long at all after people started building software systems that it was realised that one should design for maintainability, not just for the release-day functionality. People have been building houses much, much longer than they've been building software. Why don't we build houses like Ikea furniture, so that with a big enough Allen key (and perhaps some silicone sealant and a few other consumables) we can dismantle them, or even refactor them? How come to fix the spotlight in my kitchen ceiling that isn't getting power, I need to pull up glued-down lino and nailed-down floorboards in the bathroom above? How come if the same failure mode ever happened to the bathroom light, I'd have to destroy the ceiling to get at it, as there's only a tiny, completely inaccessible roof-space above it?

Peter

Because most software that is written costs the company who wrote it money when someone has to go back into the code to maintain it. They also have to dig into the code to fix bugs even before the sell the first copy of it.

So when writing software the company that writes it gets benefits from making it maintainable, rather than just making the first version as cheap as possible to produce. Even software that doesn't make it to version 2 is often coded in a maintainable way in the hope that there will be a version 2.

Building and maintaining buildings is very different. The builder doesn't care how easy the house is to maintain. The house owner isn't go to call them back in 12 months time to ask them to add some new network cabling at no cost. They also don't really have much of an issue with having to go back in to fix bugs during the building process.

Making new builds quick to throw up but hard to maintain actually makes more money for the building industry, as when the house owners gives up on maintaining it themselves it is the industry that picks up some extra work.

This is of course turned on its head when the software company involved has rich clients and its own consulting arm

Edit: I spotted one flaw in my argument. New builds of course do come with some sort of guarantees, there there must be _some_ incentive to the house builder to make things easy to maintain when they get a call 12 months after selling that some bit of wiring or pipework has failed.

Another thing. You'd think that people would buy a premium for new builds specifically designed to be easier to maintain right ?

Wrong. Exactly the people who buy new builds (in the UK, I suspect the US is very different) are the people who dream of never having to add or change things in their house. So they don't really care that the design makes it easy for them to run some extra cables or pipes at a later date.

By the way...a cool method for patching drywall, sheetrock, plasterboard or whatever you want to call it:

This method is especially useful if there is nothing behind the patch to attach the patch to.

Square up the hole your are trying to patch by trimming it with a utility knife.

Cut a patch piece exactly two inches larger than the hole in all directions.

On one side of the patch, score through the paper and some of the drywall exactly two inches from the edge on all sides.

Break the drywall cleanly along your score lines.

Gently peel 2 inch edge pieces from the paper on the opposite side.

You should now be left with a patch piece the size of your hole and two inches of paper on one side extending in all directions.

Place the patch in the hole and mud it in, using the two inches of paper on the edges as if it were tape on a seam.

A couple of coats of mud and some sanding and painting and you'll never know it was there.

I would pay a premium for inbuilt trunking and ports for every room, and for differing types of cable. In fact it is third on my list for when I get round to building my own home. I rewire every house I buy (well, not rewire all the mains, just the ones that are crap - which in a Barratt/Wimpey/Insertnamehere home is still a few) for power, network and audio. It infuriates me that the builders can't justify the tiny extra outlay to run cheap trunking. Gaaah!

I try and avoid noggins too - they are just a pain, however drilling a hole at the top of a wall, one at the bottom and then judicious use of a plumb bob can work.

Otherwise, as I'm sure I posted before, a jigsaw has served me in good stead in the past. Leaves a fair old notch to be plastered, but damn good fun.

Hmm, another test drilling has yielded further noggins. I think I'm going to try the hole in the wall and cutting a notch trick.

Funnily enough putting the words 'stud finder' into google does actually yield the correct results.

Did you have to put it in quotes?

I don't know about the UK, but if you were to go to a home (that is, DIY) center in the US, that would be the correct term to use in asking for one. Which probably helps explain why it actually shows up properly in Google.

I'd have thought it would have come up with similar results to "Latex Bondage". Hehe, 3 Dead Trolls rock.