I’ve got a single-story timber frame house. Single brick outside, plasterboard inside. When I have antenna cabling (or any kind of cabling) done, a guy comes while I’m out, magic happens, and a new outlet appears down near the bottom of the wall.
There is a horizontal noggin between the vertical wall studs. How does the wiring get past that? Does the guy use a 6 foot drill bit? Or some kind of spear to get past the noggin? (I’ve never seen either for sale).
The guy can get access to the wall cavity from the top. And has limited access from the small hole in the wall at the bottom. I can’t see that far up or down to have any kind of look. I’m never at home when the work is done.
6’ drills do exist for just this purpose. They typically come in sections.
Otherwise they can use a flexible fibreglass rod to try to find the gap between the frame and the bricks. The latter is not always present, and is more how you manage things in a double brick wall. A simple thin chain is also a useful way of getting down the gap between bricks.
The design rules require them between almost every stud. Your design rules may be different. I only /know/ they are there in the sections where I can check – at holes in the walls with wiring.
They are never all mounted at the same height (because they are nailed in from the sides/ends), and if you are willing to put all your wiring up at shoulder height you can avoid the problem. They are often around 1/3 to 2/3 down. But if I want to come down to ankle height I always have to cross one.
A good old-fashioned alarm system/telephone/electrical installer can get cables into places that are almost unbelievable. There’s a huge variety of specialized tools to help do it. There are even very strong magnets that allow them to drag chain through the walls to make lateral runs and get around objects. With drill bit extensions, we can drill well over 12’ from the access point.
Unfortunately, a lot of modern alarm installers use only wireless devices and don’t have this experience. I used to teach classes on this subject, but interest has waned.
BTW, are you sure that the installer is coming from above and not from a crawlspace? For a low installation (e.g., outlet) the crawlspace is usually the starting place. For a higher installation (e.g., a motion detector) the attic makes more sense.
A bunch of the methods have already been covered. This is what electricians do better than anyone. I know a commercial cable/fiber installer who calls on my friend, a master electrician, to do the wire routing in tough situations.
Installers can use an in-wall periscope (like this) – about $25-$30 – to look inside your walls for this. They also have fiber optic viewers, and tiny cameras (used a lot by plumbers to look inside pipes for problems).
There are many ways to fish a wire through a wall, some described here already. Rather than blindly take stabs at other possibilities, I suggest the OPer simply ask the guy who did it.
I thought so too, but a while ago I called an electrician for a quote on installing a few new outlets. He said “we can either run conduit outside the wall or bust up the drywall and run it in your walls, but you’ll have to call someone else to patch the drywall after we’re done.”
I was like, “I can install an outlet by tearing out the drywall. I called you because I didn’t want to do that!”
In any timber-framed wall construction in NZ there are three noggins between wall studs (500-600mm centres). That translated into a lot of holes to fill when we had insulation blown into the walls through the gib (drywall).
It makes getting cables down through walls from the ceiling quite a bit more difficult, and I’d rather come up from the floor.
Actually, I have just read an analysis that suggests that studs at 400mm with no noggins/nogs/dwangs may be a better and faster approach, with nogs only as necessary for fitting such as kitchen units and hanging cupboards. Interesting.
That’s amazing. I’ve got no idea what they are thinking of. Earthquakes?
I’m on a floating slab (concrete poured directly on the ground, made stronger with steel mesh and ridges poured into trenches). The frame sits on the slab, so there is no way to come up. I’ve only got one level and the roof isn’t sealed, so you can get into the edge wall cavity by lifting a roof tile (concrete roof tiles, mimicking the superior and more expensive traditional terracotta tile).
Traditional Aus houses were not really weather proof: there isn’t a need in most of Aus. My father regarded that as technically backward in a primitive country, but he also had no intention of going back to live in a place where you /needed/ to keep the weather out.
Even now that I know that long drill bits are available, I’m not seeing any for sale in any of the usual suppliers in Aus. It’s a puzzling situation. If I ever get a chance I’ll ask a local tradesman (It’s not a question you can easily ask online here).
