Best place to drill holes for cables?

I'm going to install network cable like in this guide (this guy is installing coax cable, but the idea is the same):

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When drilling a hole in the floor between two walls, should I put the hole in the middle, or at the bottom of one of the walls?

In the guide, the person apparently drilled at the bottom of one wall and avoided drilling into the beam below the floor board. Is this better because it doesn't weaken the structure of the house, or is it insignificant?

Reply to
bob
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Unless you are doing some high dollar install, I would just run the cable up through the floor next to the wall.

Cutting in a box does look more professional in case you ever move the furniture, but for most homes it really isn't necessary or noticeable.

If you use a 5/8 wood bit (or larger) you can install the cable with the ends on.

Reply to
Metspitzer

Maybe I'm confused here, but how does one drill a hole in the floor between two walls and have a choice of the hole being in the middle or bottom of the wall?

Reply to
trader4

What is below this floor, a crawl space or an unfinished basement or what?

Is this url assuming that a 3/8 x 54 Auger Drill Bit will be flexible? Maybe they are all? I bought a flexible bit at a telephone store that had all sorts of comm. hardware. They went out of business in a few years but by then Home Depot had them.

Flexible is more expensive, but it will work from wall switch height too not just from 12" high.

It's not much more money to get 72", I'm not sure I ever needed that, but it seemed worth the comparitively small amount extra. 6' is a little harder to drill with, since 2 or even 4 feet are out of the wall sometimes, but not that much harder.

I was putting in a wired burglar alarm, and phone lines, and cable from a central VCR. Some of the wires were from the attic down. That was much easier becuase the top of the wall was plain as day under the insulation. I still need to do one network cable, or maybe two. Temporarily, going on two years, my computer is in the basement and the router is on the second floor and the cable goes over doors and down through the litle area between each half-fligh of steps.

I wonder what Trader wondered.

They do make, for use with flexible drill bits, a guide, a shiny L-shaped thing, with the metal folded over and made into a hook at one endr, that goes into the hole and presses against the drill shaft at the level of the hole and also 4 inches down. I bought that but then only used it once or twice in special situations, and even those times I don't think it worked well.

It was hard to use with one hand while drilling with the other. It was hard to push up hard enough on the guide to get the bit closer to me. And I really had no idea which spot would be better than another. (Also, since my bit was 6 feet long, I often was so far from the wall, I couldn't possibly use the guide. :-) )

I made a bunch of holes that were just fine and I only hit a joist once. I didn't time how long I'd been drilling, so I couldn't compare to the normal hole, but I thought it was taking a long time and if I weren't stubborn, I could have pulled the drill out and even without the guide, likely missed the joist the second time.

The hole won't significantly weaken the house, but it will take forever to drill vertically through a floor joist or beam, at least if you're limited to your only flexible drill bit. Don't ask me how I know that.

You could make a drawing of the joists in your basement/crawl space with measurements, mostly the distance between them, and then when upstairs find some landmark to work from and perhaps figure out where any joists are.

It's good to do your own work because if you pay any utility to do it, they'll probably send a guy who has time constraints.

You should also know that besides wall plates that are dedicated to one function, like network cable or co-ax, they make plates with square holes that you can choose what kind of connector to put in, and more to my point, they make them with scoops pointing downwards, so you can't see into the wall. (I guess that would be like looking at someone's underware) but there is room for several cables, none of which terminate at the wall plate but go straight on to the devices they connect to.

Reply to
micky

I came across this that might interest you. I don't know if it actually covers your question.

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Reply to
micky

If you're coming from the basement you'll only have to drill through a sole plate, if that. The sole plate isn't a beam. I've found that places near HVAC vents work for me. It really depends on the construction of your house. I've cabled every room in the house with one only place that I drilled through a sole plate, A cable installer drilled through a closet floor when I first had cable installed. Then the only TV was in the living room, and it shared a wall with the closet. The basement under the living room had a finished ceiling, and he asked me before he did it. I didn't like it, but the alternative wasn't acceptable. It's only a short run right next to wall, and has posed no problems.

Reply to
Vic Smith

I think it is confusing what you are asking and what you want to do. Are you just running one network cable or are you trying to wire several different locations/rooms with network cable with a centrally located patch panel?

If it is just one network cable, is it going to come up from below in an open ceiling basement, or down from above in an unfinished attic space with no attic floor?

More information is needed for anyone to be able to help with this.

Reply to
TomR

If you looked at his url, I think you'll find it's neither of these two. He wants to go down from the room where the wire will end into the basement. If he were going up from the basement, it would be hard though maybe not impossible to tell where the walls are above. It would be even harder to tell where the studs in that wall are.

Vic is right: The heating vent grills are at the end of heating ducts, which almost always run between joists in the basement ceiling, just about centered between 2 of them usually. If the wall you, the OP, are putting the wire in is parallel to a rectangular heating vent grill****, you can use one of those vents to figure out where the joists next to it are, and since joists are every 16 inches or whatever you measure in the basement, you can calculate where the other joists are.

***If you can't see the ducts from the basement, you could remove one of the grills and see which direction the duct is going, maybe see where the joists are. The orientation of a rectangular grill is not full proof of which direction the duct comes from.

If the wall is perpedicular to the grill, maybe the whole wall is over a joist**, or it's not. Once you calculate, maybe you'll use the floor outside the wall. **Hey, maybe that's why I drilled through one.

Reply to
micky

I guess you found out the same way that I did. I would love to see how an experienced cable jockey uses those long flex bits because I never did get the hang of them. That tool you described that applies downward pressure sounds interesting but it doesn't sound like it was very helpful.

When I rewired this house, I just stuck with 18" twist drills and those speed auger bits whose name escapes me at the moment - damn - this senility problem just keeps getting worse! Forstner! At least I didn't have to Google it to remember. I just read an article that said that older people's memory retrievals are slower because they have so much data stored in their head that access time slows down.

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I ended up using my "fox and hound" tester to make sure I wasn't drilling into a floor joist from above. It mostly worked. (-: The biggest problem I had drilling from floor to floor was hitting nails. The Forstner bit can be resharpened pretty easily with a Dremel tool, at least for the first half dozen nails or so. Then there's not enough left of the cutting twist to sharpen anymore.

Reply to
Robert Green

No, it wasn't. It's shaped like an L, each part about 14" long, made from shiny steel about 1/2" wide and 1/4" or less thick. I think it has a twist where the bend of the L is. One end is bent back to make the handle, and the other end I think is also bent back.

Maybe if I did this for months I'd have gotten better able to use the tool, though maybe not. I think it was just their best effort to make some sort of tool that might work.

Sherlock Holmes said that eventually our brains got full and then everytie we learned something new, we had to throw away something old. But I'm not saying he's right.

It doesnt' matter if, judging by phyical brain wrinkles, actual wrinkles seen during an autopsy, humans only use 20% of their brains, or whatever they say. Perhaps that is our maximum. Maybe we don't have enough of some enzyme or other chemical to use the rest. Percent of wrinkling isn't the only factor to consider.

Another study I heard on NPR says that scientists used to think that children under 3? were not capable of forming memories, but some study implied they made many memories but forgot them sooner, that the rate of forgetting was high until age 6 when it slowed a lot and didn't get high again until old age.

OTOH, without the ability to forget, we might have trouble finding our car because we'd remember where we parked it 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 days ago as well. And we would perhaps be tormented by every bad thing that had happened, as well as uplifted by every good thing that had ever happened to us.

Hmm.

Reply to
micky

Yes, long flex bits were a major disappointment for me, but it could be that there's a technique to using them that eludes me. More than one time I've watched Hometime or TOH and watched them do something *correctly* that I had been doing wrong for years. One thing that especially comes to mind is drywall work. While my technique was not as bad as my first business partner who would lather on a mountain of mud and then spend hours sanding it down with a belt sander, it was still not good. The most important thing I learned from TOH was to have a good selection of trowels, especially very wide ones.

fuller-mind/

He may have been correct, at least according to these studies. When you think about how much of your life you can remember in great detail, it's amazing it all fits.

I think that 20% number has been debunked. We may be using only 20% of our total brain capacity when executing any one task, but that's sort of like driving a car at 20 MPH that can do 100 MPH when it's required.

Infant and animal studies are notorious for dubious conclusions because the study participants are unable to talk so a lot of information has to be inferred - often quite incorrectly.

Hey, I have a recurring nightmare, possibly from nearly getting heat stroke looking for a white rental car in a Phoenix parking lot at noon, of not being able to find my car. Part of it stems from the accursed alternate side of the street parking I grew up with in NYC. You'd awaken at 5AM in a sweat wondering if your car was on the correct side of the street.

The bottom line for me when it came to heavying up the wiring in this house was to bite the bullet and admit I would have to replaster and repaint. Once you make that choice, re-wiring gets a lot easier because you can just chisel out channels for the new wires.

Reply to
Robert Green

Forget about all that, I still don't understand the question:

"When drilling a hole in the floor between two walls, should I put the hole in the middle, or at the bottom of one of the walls? "

Clearly from the online example he found, he's drilling a hole inside the wall, so what's up with the part about "middle" or "bottom" of the wall?

And for technique, if it's basement underneath, you can usually locate where the wall sits by any electrical wires, heating ducts, water pipes, etc that run up into that wall. Then you can drill up from the basement and avoid the long bit.

Reply to
trader4

Well they're definitely good for switches 4 feet off the floor. You don't need any technique except to know that a short stiff bit won't work. I have two glass and wood breakage sensors that height. And I also bypassed the on/off switch to t he kitchen with 110volts from a relay I connected to the burglar alarm, so when I opened the front door or the alarm went off, the kichen lights went on. (I tried for the hall lights too, but becaues of the 3-way switches, I got slowed down and switched to the kitchnen. )

That worked fine until I put a timer on the kitchen lights, and then bypassing the wire that powered the timer/on/off switch meant zero volts to the timer and it lost track of time.

IIRC the new alarm board doesn't have the output for the pre-beeping period anyhow.

Until I was 55 or so, I could remember every place I'd ever been, everything I'd ever said, and everything I'd ever done. Not individually, I could't remember every place I'd eaten spaghetti, but I remembered every food I'd eaten, and every place I'd eaten food.

But it's been downhill noticeably since then. (I'm 67.) I had this great 5 month trip from Chicago to San Antonio with my car and then hitchhiking to Panama. I used to remember every leg of the hitchhiking, where people picked me up, what they said to me, what was unusual about any that was unusual, what I had done in each town, and for years people told me to write a book about it. I even had the title, Travels with Mario. (Of course that took 5 seconds to write, not like the book would take.) But now I can't write it if I tried because I've forgotten some good details, and some parts don't even fit together anymore.

Plus when I play Jeopardy with the television, I don't do nearly as well. I used to get about 20** right out of 30, before the contestants had time to give the answer. Now it's 15 or fewer. (I no longer count because it's depressing.) I went to the tryouts in Atlantic City and poeple told me to win on the show, you had to get 25 out of 30.

**There is always one category I know nothing about, like current music or like Academy Awards, and usually one I know little about. Which kept my number from going over 20. I could handle that, since I wasn't interested in those two topics anyhow (and I'm sort of amazed that the winners know so much about so many subjects, things I would think they're not interested in either, but they seem to know them.. In truth my knowledge is superficial, and if I know the author of something, it doens't mean I've read it or no anything about the contents, but then again, I'm sure that's true for just as many answers on the show.

Okay. Good.

Yeah, I forget what method they used to show that the kid remembered something. It seemed reasonable but not conclusivey accurate. Still I think the notion that children under 3 can't form memories is absurd. But once they get out of the house everything is a new thing for them and their old memories are overwhelmed. I think it's now hard to form memories without words to go with them**, but recently I experienced just that. My arms and hands were in a cetain position, maybe like playing golf but not that, and it reminded me of another time they were in that position. No words involved.

**For example, one of the guys who picked me up hitchhikng was in Nicaragua maybe, and he had a driver and he rode in the back seat of a 4-door car. He looked a little like an Indian iirc, and he wore bi-focal, or even tri-focal*** sunglasses, which I had never seen before (or since if they were tri-focal) and had a small revolver in his belt. I have an image of all this without words, but I also have a lot of words to go with it, so it's hard to know how well I could remember it without words. ***One of the details I've forgotten, did he wear bi-focals or tri-focals. The latter are exceedingly rare, especially in 1971.

Normally I would have talked to the driver as I opened the passenger door to get in, but in this case the driver drove forward so I was next to the driver side rear seat, where he sat (Just two in the car) , so I actually saw what was in his lap and I guess he knew I saw it. I still took the ride, but it was short and we didnt' say a word to each other iirc. (again, iirc. Until I was 50, I recalled everything about this trip correctly. ) Even though he must have had an intesting story. ]\

I lived in Brookly for 12 years, and had a car the whole time. I woke up like that a few times, but much of the time the bad hours were 11 to

  1. But when I got a regular job, I had to get the subway by 8:40 when I worked in lower manhattan. And of coure all the spots were taken long before then. So one time I'm driving around looking for a spot (and if it's not near me, it's farther from my subway line, the A train.) and when I realied there were none, I got a twist in my gut, spastic colon I think it's called. I did park t he car some place, and got to work a little late (and they always assumed there was a delay on the subway not my fault. I never toldl them it was only 4 stops from my station to my exit, and I never got delayed on the train. It was always me.) My gut was stil twisted that night and again all day the next day. So the second night I went to a n'hood doctor. I think I went to a radiologist who only practiced general medicine on Tuesday evenings.

Why I didnt' go to my own GP who was 2 blocks away I don't remember. He was 80 years old and his receptionist nurse was also 80. He charged 5 dollars in the 70's and 80's for an office visit. She would go to the far end of this big room, had been a living room in a very big house (they lived upstairs) and she would fall asleep there, until my visit was over. He was still taking course in his 80's. One week he wasn't in all week while he took a course at Maimonides Hospital.

Anyhow, the radiologist was about about to prescribe an antispasmodic with a tranquilizer in it, he told me, and I asked if I could have just the antispasmodic. He said yes, of course, and I guess that worked by the next day. All this because I coudlnt find a parking place.

I'm pretty sure I can't plaster worth a darn. Which is why the wires from the ceiling down the outside wall are still outside the wall where the ceiling meets the wall and where the wall has a fire stop. I don't care anymore. I may just let the next owners fix it.

Reply to
micky

We'll just have to wait for clarification. I gave up on trying to read people's minds! (-:

Have no clue. Just thought I might try to get some utility out of the thread and possible pick up some pointers about how to better use these flexible drills I appear to have wasted money on. I had such high hopes for them that never materialized. I was replacing two prong outlets with grounded ones.

In some cases I just settled for installing GFCI outlets without trying to pull a new ground wire. In other cases I installed completely new outlets - the old wiring had only two(!) outlets per room. I guess in 1940, that was "hot stuff." For new outlets, I chiseled out a rectangle at outlet height and then drilled down through that hole (or, if I couldn't get the angle right, chiseled out a channel for the new wire.

And you can get pretty easily fooled in some situations depending on what reference points are available. DAMHIKT. (-: I only drilled up a few times time and that was enough to convince me to drill from the finished space INTO the unfinished space and not vice-versa. The fox and hound tester actually worked pretty nicely to indicate where things lined up between floors. Next time, I will probably use a stud finder and a super st rong neodymium magnet to see if that gives me a more precise indication.

Reply to
Robert Green

Just to remind you, you don't need a ground wire or a 3rd prong for a GFCI to work They measure the current in the hot and neutral and if they are not the same, they trip. They don't use the ground at all aiui.

Darn right. I think of what my brother and had in my room in 1964. Just a lamp on the desk and a clock radio. And I'd recently gotten sick of the windup clock I used, because it ticked so loud, and I screamed at it, and my mother had an unused electric alarm clock all along. (It might have had a radium dial so she didnt' want to use it until I complained.)

And a ham radio receiver, but most people wouldn't have had that.

And that's pretty much all I had until I was 24, had roommates, and I put a tv in my room. Still, two double outlets was enough. That was until '74.

Reply to
micky

I was aware of that, and that's why I put in GFCI's - so I could at least accommodate 3 pin plugs without an adapter. Even have them labeled "No Equipment Ground" using the little labels that come with the GFCI's (-: Hated to do it because some equipment depends on having a connection to ground, but 3 pin compatibility was more important at the time.

Hey, I had a Hallicrafters at the time. Still have the little Lafayette stereo receiver I bought with settlement money from a car crash where some idiot in an Impala ran a stop sign and our little Karmann Ghia virtually dissolved when we broadsided him at 30+ MPH.

The world has certainly changed in that short time. I've been installing four foot long outlet strips that Harbor Freight sells on all of the workbenches and along the kitchen counter. I wouldn't even hazard a guess about how many things are plugged in around the house, but I'll bet it's over 100.

Reply to
Robert Green

Unless they are not. (-: I think in another thread someone was talking about a mantel installation and the discovery that there was nothing but air at 16" with the stud being at 17.5"

When I last installed shelving around a window, it looked like someone sprayed the wall with a tiny machine gun. That's because I kept drilling small pilots holes looking for the studs (which clearly weren't 16" apart). Just saying . . .

Reply to
Robert Green

Yes, I have 5 clock-like things right next to my bed alone.

The DVDR, the VCR (though there's no point in setting the time since I don't have the right remote and can only tape at the highest quality, 2 hours on one tape) The clock radio I listen to the radio with and which has good sound. The clock radio I use to wake up with which is little and has terrible sound, but a very nice alarm, that starts low and gets louder. The atomic clock that someone sold me for 1 dollar at a hamfest, which I'm supposed to use to set the time on the DVDR, which often has the time a minute or two off even though it has an automatic setting. My friend who got a later model has the same problem. This uses batteries.

Plus two lamps**, a VCR tape rewinder, a UPS, a powered FM antenna, a powered VHF modulator to modulate the digital signal for my analog tv, the powermid receiver, to receive remote control signals from other rooms, a second powermid receiver I should really unplug, the digital to analog converter to get the OTA signal to my VCR. sometimes the electric blanket, the tv on the left, the powered computer speaker since the tv speaker gives terrible sound, and a couple other things.

Plus in the closet an unplugged no longer current cable box, and a tv signal amplifier, because the signal splits there and goes to the attic and first floor. That's been plugged in for 29 years straight and has never given me a problem. Sometimes it gets covered with clothes, but it doesn't care.

**Next to the bed. There are two other lamps in the room and a ceiling fixture.

That's 20 things plugged in. Most, are off or use very little current. Actually all except the 14" TV.

I'll get back to you on the rest of the house.

Reply to
micky

I continued, " or whatever you measure in the basement,"

Reply to
micky

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