I installed my LCD tv with a wall mount, ten years ago. The result was pure frustration and failure.
The DirecTv receiver was on an old TV tray. Electrical Cables hanging down the wall & on the floor. The coax went down the wall to the receiver and then back up to to the tv.
It was a hideous eyesore. We were tripping on the extension cord and bumping into the TV tray.
Fixing the problem took a week of DIY in the evenings and $50 in materials.
I cut into the sheetrock, tapped into the closest wall receptacle and installed a wall plug behind the TV. I patched the sheetrock and repainted the bedroom.
Built a wall shelf for the receiver.
Stapled the coax to the ceiling and painted the cable. It blends in quite well.
There’s a book shelf speaker in the photo. That’s for my stereo. I play music from my laptop. The tv doesn’t use the stereo speakers.
Looks pretty sharp.
How did you deal with this problem?
Electricians usually didn’t install wall plugs six feet high on the wall. Plugging in a wall mounted TV’s is a hassle and requires an extension cable. Do New Homes have a special wall plug for wall mounted TV’s?
What did you do with the cable or satellite receiver? How did you hide the coax cables? Mine are hidden behind the TV.
I’d like to setup a wall mounted 34 inch TV in the living room. But I don’t want to spend another week of DIY recreating my bedroom installation.
That satellite receiver shelf is screwed into 2x4 blocking that I installed between the wall studs. It’ll easily support 30 lbs. We had planned to put a DVD player on it.
At a friend’s house I had access to the backside of the wall which made it easy.
I bought a kit that had plastic sections one for behind the TV had space for a receptacle and a hole for the other cables. The piece for the bottom had the access hole for the cables. The cable box sat on the furniture below the TV, but no cables visible.
One easy option is something similar to Wiremold cord covers (e.g.). YMMV if it’s suitable for you. The typical type is adhesive (quite strong) and can be painted.
We have a TV stand that is a hollow post with a couple glass shelves. The cables can be routed in the post, from about six inches off the ground, up to the shelves, similar to this unit (but mine is taller). I only wish the post was larger so routing the cables would be easier.
In most new construction that I’ve seen lately, the electrician put in a high cable jack and duplex outlet at the six-foot level. That’d be fine until you decide to move your TV’s location later.
The house was built with a power point behind where the TV is. Other cables such as HDMI from / to the receiver, the aerial cable, and a USB cable to an external hard drive for recording go through a hole in the wall, to drop down and come out from another hole behind the entertainment unit. Receiver, PS4, centre speaker, Apple TV, and ext hard drive are in the unit. Other speaker cables run inside the wall up to the roof space to go to the back of the room for surround.
Edit: The setup for this room was made much easier by the fact the TV wall backs on to the garage, so if I needed to make holes in the wall to get cables through or around noggins or studs, I could do it from the back and not worry about an unsightly botched drywall repair.
Our other TV room did not have a power point in place for the TV so I’ve dropped the power cord and the HDMI cable down through the wall cavity. This TV also doesn’t have external speakers or a receiver etc, just a PS4 connected and the TV aerial.
I’ve done another TV setup for my mother in law. She was happy to have cables hidden by an external duct, so I used one of those. It works fine and is hardly noticeable.
When I had a house built in Japan, I had them put power up to the ceiling in two places: one for a projector and the other for the screen. We had conduit for the signal and control wiring in case they needed to be upgraded in the future.
We also had ceiling speakers in the rooms and a centralized control system, so it was kind of overboard. I was working in that industry at the time, so I got everything cheap.
If you know what you want, it’s easiest to build it into the house. If you’re in Taiwan like I’m not, then forget about it, because the houses are brick and concrete.
I got a roll of two-color cable cover. White on one side, black on the other. We have dark wainscoting and a white wall. So a segment of black wrapping below, a segment of white wrapping above.
Note that a lot of DIY AC behind-the-wall extension kits sold for this application are very much against code and are unsafe.
The house that I bought had something like that for the TV in the basement. I didn’t like it, so I tried to remove it. Holy hell, was that a bitch. The adhesive is so strong, I ended up taking most of the top paper layer from the sheet rock with it. Then I had to use a ton of spackle to replace the torn up sheet rock. It looks nice now that it is repaired.
I wish they would have used a couple of boxes and put the wires through the wall (like GaryM mentioned above), which is what they did in the living room. I thought that access to the walls in the basement would have been much easier than in the living room. I’m guessing they just got lazy.
Good point to mention. Only AC wire made for in wall use should be back there. Never use extention cords or zip cord. Signal cables are OK though and running them in low voltage conduit makes replacement easy if ever needed.
