Installing Cables in Suspended Ceilings

The DIY cable installer eyes a suspended ceiling in much the same way as a boozer eyes an open bar. Hiding the cables is the only way to go for a neat and tidy media centre installation. Suspended ceilings offer lots of ways of quickly and painlessly getting your media centre cables from A to B. But there are a few tricks of the trade to make the most of the space in the ceiling. This article will describe one such trick for getting a cable from the ceiling space to floor level, or vice-versa. The assumption is that your place has stud walls and suspended ceilings.

The ceiling space is ideal for running a cable horizontally. If you’ve got halogen lights, all the better: removing the lights will give you handy access holes for fishing the cable. But eventually you’ll need to run the cable from the ceiling space to the gap between the wall studs so that the cable can run vertically to about 20cm above the floor level where you’ll install a wall socket.

It’s the junction between the ceiling and the wall that’s the problem. The first commandment of the DIY cable installer is not to cut into the plasterboard unless you absolutely have to. You’ll probably need to break this commandment when fishing a cable from ceiling space to the space between the wall studs. The idea is to cut a hole in the ceiling as close to the wall as you can get it so that you can get your hand into the ceiling space and punch a hole with a screwdriver in the hidden wall plaster directly above where your wall socket will be. Once you’ve got your hole in the wall plaster, tie a weight to a bit of string, feed the weight through the wall hole and let gravity pull the string to the wall socket hole that you’ve cut 20cm above the floor. Grab the string through your wall socket, tape your cable to the string, and pull the cable from the ceiling space to the wall socket.

You’ll need a stud finder to do this job properly. It’s important that you identify the furring channels in the ceiling (steel channels to which the plaster board is screwed). Often you’ll get a furring channel running right next to the wall – this is a pain because you will need to cut your hole further from the wall than you would like. Another problem might be noggings in the wall (horizontal supports for the studs). If you meet a noggin, there’s nothing for it but to cut a hole into the plaster so that you can nick the noggin and pass the cable through it.

If your walls and ceilings intersect using what is called shadow lines, you are in luck. Shadow lines allow you to get your service hole very near to the wall. Bad luck though if you have architraves; these can’t be cut so your service hole will be further from the wall, necessitating a bigger hole. Keep the hole a small as you can though – bigger holes are harder to fill. And for once kids come in handy since their small arms and hands are perfect for feeding cables into tricky spots.

Having got your cable installed, wired-up the socket and tested that all is working your last task is to patch up the hole. Gyprock has instructions here http://www.gyprock.com.au/Gyprock/Co...epair-hole.pdf . Alternatively, you can simply cover the hole with a blank wall-plate, especially if it is out of the way and you don’t fancy messing with plaster. Whatever way you choose, rest assured that using ceiling spaces and wall spaces to hide cables gives a vastly superior result to tacking the cables along the skirting boards, or worse, that hideous plastic cable trunking stuff.