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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

The photos show a lot of cables stuck to walls. I’m surprised people are ok with this.

Every house I have lived in has done it too and it’s the first thing I rip out.

I see contractors (usually ISP installers) doing this inside and outside houses too and it irritates me. UV, animals/insects, wind etc gets at them and water goes in the holes. The fixings that hold the cable rust/degrade and fall out.

Doing it right costs more and takes longer but I’m unsure if the cost is greater when you look back 5-10 years.

Maybe doing this is slightly more repairable if the place is a rental?

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You may underestimate the time and effort that can be involved in in-wall cabling in a retrofit situation... like most in my area I live in a house that is coming up on 100 years old, while I do my best to run all cables through walls there are situations where I have to run cables in conduits on the exterior as the only way to do otherwise would be to resheetrock most of the ceiling. There's just a cost-benefit analysis here, and most contractors aren't willing to put in the time (because the customer doesn't want to pay for the time!) to open up the walls to get access to run cables through them. Keep in mind that when you consider demolition, hanging sheetrock, texture, prime, paint, and clean, any cabling situation where walls need to be opened is probably going to be billed as a full day, and local building/licensing codes may not allow a low-voltage technician to perform that work, requiring a builder to be subcontracted.

There are tricks like flexible installer bits that allow for short runs through-wall without removing the wallboard but you're going to need an access hole every couple of studs at least... and at that point you're setting yourself up for so much patching it might be faster to just open up the wall entirely. You can also use all kinds of wire-pulling tools, I have a 30' telescoping fiberglass pole that I have used to run cables through inaccessible attics (flat and shallow roofs common here), but once again, you get into situations where running the cable for a single surveillance camera is an 8-hour job! I put up with this for my own house but clients aren't so happy about it...

And all of this is assuming wood-frame walls which are the norm for interior walls but exterior in many areas can be brick, adobe, etc., and blown-in insulation is great for heating bills but can make cable runs in exterior walls a huge headache.

At the same time, cables run "cable-installer style" (stapled to gables and run down exterior to straight-through holes) regularly last for over a decade and are very easy to repair when there are problems and modify when needs change. It's hard to blame them.

It cost me $3000 to have a professional run 7 CAT6 cables to every room throughout my 80 yo house, plus one to the modem, along with wiring proper earthed power into another four locations or so. The man was not claustrophobic. Plus less than $500 for another contractor to fill in and paint the sheetrock that was required in storage rooms. The cables meet in the basement in a server rack.

It was well worth it to me. I have teenagers and everyone has an Eero in their room, plus hardwire for the home theater and office.

That’s a lot of money. I’ve run about that many and while the the material cost was relatively low, but it has been days of work and a lot of frustration and mess. I think you picked wisely.

> You may underestimate the time and effort that can be involved in in-wall cabling in a retrofit situation.

I totally hear you. I’ve done a lot myself, most recently on Saturday.

It’s hours and hours per run. I’ve used many weekends doing this and it sounds like you have too (and it seems you have considerably more sophisticated tools!), but the alternative is looking at cables that run along the walls.

I ran into a new one recently - the nogs (dwangs to some) being angled to give a herringbone pattern. A complete nightmare for retrofitting.

Agreed here. I'd love to run cable to access points on my 1st floor ceiling, but the work required to do that (getting it up from the basement into the ceiling and through the joists) is just too much work. I've decided just to run the cable on the ceiling.

If I ever build or renovate a house, I'll be running it like that though.

In new construction, consider running "smurf tube" or other conduit between structured wiring enclosures. You'll be able to pull through more cables in the future reasonably easily, especially if you leave pulling line for yourself. In theory you can also get network appliances and etc. that mounts nicely in the structured wiring boxes although honestly the selection/pricing is kind of lame on those. This is starting to be more common in new construction, esp. multi-family.

You also have to consider the author is located in Switzerland, which has a much different construction style when compared to, say, California.

In order to actually lay wiring underneath a masonry wall, you need to rent/own a wall chaser, be aware of where existing cable runs are, and be prepared for a lot of work: prepare the room for dirty work (cover the floor and furniture, isolate the affected rooms from the rest of the house), do the actual cutting work, lay the conduit, re-plaster the entire run, re-paint it (sometimes re-paint the entire wall if you don't have a good color match), clean up. You're basically looking at an entire day of work if you're doing this solo, plus prep. And it's pretty much never doable in any rental.

I have been doing this in my house. Takes much longer than a day. For example I installed 2 Dolby atmos systems, with pipes for HDMI, network, power as well as 9 speakers - took many days in total.

are hdmi cable durable? i have too many bad experience with faulty hdmi cables so i never think of doing this.

Having run a few to ultrasound machines, never have the plug coming out the wall, have a female plug on a wall plate at each end. That way a ruined plug can be fixed and a new wall plate added without redoing the drop.

In residential places in Europe I‘ve seen this mostly in old buildings where the walls are stone/brick underneath, so I am assuming it would be hard to put the cables inside walls?

Also, this was always inside, not on the outside walls, plus the cables were laid in tubes fixed to the wall and painted over, so well enough protected, probably.

Did you see issues with decay with this sort of installation even inside an appartment?

I've seen damaged cables from kids, cats and dogs. Ive also seen water damage inside, thought that was in the termination so could be fixed. My main objection is that I don't want to see them, with damage coming second.

Depends on the walls. At my parent's, the house was built ~60 years ago with solid brick walls, no space to run fiber or copper cables.

Is there a basement/crawl space? I have cut a narrow slot in the wall and then drilled down to the basement/crawl space for this. Messy, needs plastering and repainting but avoids exposed wiring.

I have no idea what you do if there is no basement. Go behind skirting boards?

You wall chase, then run conduit inside the wall, then repair.

My internal walls are solid brick. In the last 3 years, I've moved my router twice (moved from DSL to coax and to FTTP),and I've ended up running Ethernet cabling around one room.

Fixing the walls after cable runs is nasty. Underfloor is possible but usually involves pulling up a floorboard or two which isn't ideal...

A tip for surface cabling without major digging for houses with baseboard is to use a router to make a channel in the backside of the baseboard and just run in that. I've seen electricians in the US do this for outlet wiring, in addition to phone/data.

What’s the right way to do it?

https://www.google.com/search?q=structured+wiring&rlz=1CASIC...

https://www.homedepot.com/c/ab/structured-wiring-and-network....

If you are building new or renovating, run the cable pipes before the walls are in place. If the walls are already there its much trickier, but still doable with a long bendable drill and magnets, and you might end up with the switch on the attic as its easier to drop down.

I find going up from the basement to be easiest. Dirt rocks and spider webs beats heat, grime and ceiling creatures.

A lack of space above or below and solid brick walls are going to be seriously limiting. Possibly the only upside to New Zealand’s average house quality is that there is space everywhere and most things are hollow.

> you might end up with the switch on the attic

UniFi makes stuff I like and this situation sounds like a great use for their ‘Flex’ switch which is managed and POE powered.

I find going up from the basement to be easiest. Dirt rocks and spider webs beats heat, grime and ceiling creatures.

I think it depends on what creatures you have in your area.

In my location, I'll take ceiling creatures (bats, owls) over basement creatures (multiple poisonous arachnids, poisonous snakes, poisonous lizards, etc...)

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