CAT6 Wall Fishing

five or six weeks ago i did a video called it was one of my on the road series i think it was number eight and in that video i had an issue where i was trying to get one of those unify access points off the wall and it just was not coming off the wall until i found this tool this is the sort of unifi device removal tool and of course the right tool for the job is always the best option this came from a company called techtoolsupply.com and after i had posted that video even though they didn't know that i was actually going to promote them in that video it was just something that was that happened organically they got a lot of traffic to their website and they were like where's this traffic coming from so they reached out to me when they figured it out and they said hey listen if there's any other tools you want to try out just let us know and so of course i love tools right i love different tools especially tech tools right and since i just moved into this new house i do have a lot of wires to pull this house has basically coaxial cable everywhere but it does have a really nice attic and if i have the right tools i can actually replace a lot of the coaxial connections in this house with good cat 6 cabling so that's what we're going to do today with some of these new tools that i have from techtoolsupply.com and if you guys are interested in these same tools they were also nice enough to provide a coupon code for various special offers that i will have details about on the screen here as well as down below in the description so what did they send me first of all i'll start over here this is the magna pool okay so this is a way to get cables through a wall with a magnet basically it's very simple you have this incredibly strong magnet here and then you have this sort of like metal shuttle right here which can go through the wall now this is very this is a very strong magnet as you can tell and so you basically put this in your wall and then you stick the magnet part on the outside of the drywall it magnets together and then this rolls down the wall so you can basically pull your cables which are attached to the end of this thing straight down the wall so what comes in this kit we get of course the little metal shuttle here we get the very strong magnet keep that away from any old school hard drives and then you get some looks like some chains i'm not sure exactly what you'd use the chains for let's see if there's like hooks on them or something nope it's just a chain so i'm not exactly sure what the chain's all about but this should allow you to pull stuff through drywall it should also oh it says jack chain wall drop so i'm not a cable installer a lot of this stuff is brand new to me what i am going to be using this for is running this through the wall to get cables down the wall also this is good for under carpet right so if you want to run under the carpet this magnet works very well and it comes with this sheet of instruction that gives various instructions for a hollow wall dropping insulated wall dropping steel stud while dropping under carpet and then the jack chain wall drop which again i don't know what that is but uh you know i will if i ever run into a situation where i have to do a jack chain wall drop okay so that's the first tool the second tool the second tool is also pretty awesome let me put this down so this is a kit this is the cable ferret kit it comes with the cable ferret which we're going to talk about in a second and it also comes with a sort of standard push-pull rod kit now this one got a little bit damaged in shipping but these are just you know plastic rods made to go down the wall not going to damage these things at all they're perfectly fine so this is the wire push pull set this is a 30 foot kit and it has a couple of different heads on it for you know making sure that you can get through insulation and stuff like that that's pretty standard though what's not standard is the cable ferret wi-fi this thing is pretty slick so what this is is this little tiny guy right here now this is uh got a battery inside you can charge it with usb type c and then we get a light okay and it's a camera and it's a very small tiny camera and so the notion here is that this has these connectors for going on to the push pull rod and then you can stick this down into a cavity where you can't reach or where you can't see and then you can use your phone to watch the feed from the camera over wi-fi right so this is a very very handy tool it also comes with a number of sort of accessories here let me turn the light off so we're not wasting battery so it comes with a number of accessories uh this one is a telescoping rod right so if you wanted to sort of bend around a corner you can put it on the end of this rod right here then we have another standard uh rod that can affix to the front of this thing and then it comes with some adapters for the push pull rod these look like male to female adapters it has a hook that you can tie onto the front of here and it also has a magnet attachment so if for instance i was working with this ubiquity tool and i dropped it down in a crevice somewhere i can use my push pull rod with this camera the magnet attached to the end of the camera and i can come down and we can retrieve that tool okay so that's pretty cool i think it'll actually do like bigger tools too like a screwdriver yeah look at that right so if you're careful i don't think it'll like it'll it'll come off pretty easy but if you're careful you could even pick up something like a screwdriver from a crevice somewhere that's really neat the cable ferret also has a really funny uh installation video or usage video at techtoolsupply.com if you guys go check that out uh i got a couple of laughs out of their uh the usage video for this thing it's really funny all right so before i get started using any of these tools i do want to preface this with i am not a cable pulling expert i do not pull cables through walls for a living i have never done that for a living i am a novice at pulling cables through walls so that being said do not take this as an instructional video but if you're gonna take anything from this video learn from my mistakes all right rather than i'm gonna teach you through the mistakes that i make in other words so one thing i do strongly strongly believe in though is that having the right tools for the job makes a tremendous difference and gets you so much closer to success so i'm really glad that i have these tools i'm going to start by just playing around with this cable ferret and seeing if i can get some video of the inside of my walls and then we are going to try to run a line i've got a couple spots over here in the corner where i want to get a line up into my attic and from my attic i'm going to put in my usw industrial switch on the wall and then from there i can kind of fan connections out to other areas of the house so it's going to be a big project i'm not going to get all of it done in this video but i do want to get started and i wanted to show you guys these tools because i am super stoked to just play around with these let alone actually use them successfully so all right all that being said let's get started so yes many many mistakes were made now rather than make you watch all of these painful lessons on my part i figured it'd be a better idea just to do a voiceover and cover everything that i learned so the first area that i wanted to run some cat6 cables was right here in the corner of my office i wanted two cat six cables from the floor up to this unused electrical box near the ceiling i'll be using that for an office camera and then the spare connection is gonna be for you know testing equipment or access points or cameras or whatever i happen to be testing so i started by opening the box at the top which used to have one coax connection and one rj11 phone connection i clipped both of these out and then drilled a hole at the bottom to run the new cat6 cables i wanted to do some testing with the cable ferret wi-fi camera but being that this is an exterior wall it's just filled with insulation and so i really couldn't get the camera very far up into the hole we're going to get back to that cable ferret a little bit later my first mistake when attempting to run wires through this wall was that i tried to run two cat6 cables directly first with the magnet pull and then by using the wall rods since i wanted to run two cat6 cables simultaneously i pulled out enough length of cable and then bent it in half i attached the bent section to the magnet pole with electrical tape and then tried to get it up the wall but with the insulation in the wall it just didn't work the resistance of the cables trying to get past the insulation was just too much for the magnapull i then tried using the wall rods and this actually worked okay in that i was able to get the wall rods all the way up through the insulation but i still made the mistake of trying to get the cat6 cables through the wall attached directly to the wall rod they only made it part of the way up the wall and then i pulled on them a little bit too hard and the cables disconnected from the wall rod causing me to slam my hand against the ceiling and actually took some skin off of one of my knuckles you can see a band-aid on my finger and some of the subsequent footage here after smashing my finger against the ceiling i realized that i was missing something and that something was polyline so rather than pulling cables through the wall directly man it's just so much easier to pull some lightweight polyline through the walls instead once the polyline was through i was able to attach the cat6 cables to the polyline and they pulled through the wall very easily all right so here we have the polyline just double knotted to the back of the shuttle portion of the magnet pool we're gonna stick that into the wall down here and we're going to grab it with the magnet now i can feel that that is on there so we're going to start pulling up slowly and as you can see it is pulling right through the wall and of course you can sort of feel if it lets go which so far it has not and i've got plenty of slack here so there's no resistance on the line whatsoever when i had done this with just regular cat 5 or cat 6 cables there was too much resistance from the cat6 cables and it did not work so i'm using this poly line which is of course much lighter than a cat6 cable and it seems to pull straight through the wall no problem all right so i got it all the way up there and i should be able to just pull it out the top there we go so now i've got my first line pulled through i could tell already that this would work a lot better if you had two people one person doing the feeding of the cable and another person you know pulling at the other end unfortunately it's just me today so yeah i'm having to sort of go back and forth from the top to the bottom to sort of straighten out the bottom cables and make sure they're feeding in properly all right yeah so there we go two cables through and now i'm going to cut this here and then i'll basically uh tie these off for now because i'm not going to terminate them right away i want to get the next set of cables that's going up even further into the attic i want to get those done first before i actually terminate these ones and close everything up now we get to our next big mistake one of the goals i had for this project was to get some sort of network connectivity up here in my attic in this case i'm using the usw industrial this is a great switch and it should be able to put up with the you know more extreme temperatures you know super cold in the winter and super warm in the summertime of my attic environment but from here i can take an input and sort of fan it out around the house and just more easily distribute cat6 to other areas i had also taken the time to build and paint this backboard for the switch and any other components that i might want to have up here this 1u24 port keystone patch panel is from cable matters and i'll make sure that i have a link to this as well as all of the equipment that i use in this video down in the description below so it was easy enough to get the backboard and switch mounted up here but from that spot down in my office i thought i could just use the wall rods to push another piece of polyline up through the wall and directly into my attic but what ended up happening is i got three or four minutes of footage of me poking at the underside of a 4x4 beam that caps off the wall cavity at the top which i'm pretty sure is a standard thing when it comes to wood framing and drywall constructed houses there's just no way to get a cable through the top of a wall cavity without drilling a hole and the way that my roof sits and the way that this hvac ducting sits there's realistically no easy way to get to that exterior wall and drill a hole down into the wall cavity i mean you could do it if you absolutely had to but in my case i went for plan b which was to move where my cross connect terminates down in my office to a section of wall that's much much easier to get to the exterior wall where i ran my first set of cables is right here behind me now from this wall i can't get up into the attic because there's a ridge cap above the wall cavity and i can't get down from the top to drill a hole because there's just really no easy way to access this exterior wall from up in the attic so instead if we come off of this wall to this side wall here and we go about six feet over it's much much easier to access from the attic and as an added bonus there's no insulation in this interior wall it's just an empty wall cavity and basically a free fall drop straight down so what i had to do here was first measure to find the interior wall that i wanted to use for the cross connect up in my attic i basically found that interior wall first then i moved away some of the attic insulation to clear a path to the 4x4 that caps off the interior wall cavity i also used a piece of plywood to bridge the gap between the cross beams in the attic to give myself a more stable platform to work from once i knew where to drill i used a three-quarter inch drill bit to drill down through the 4x4 once i was all the way through i then attached some polyline to the magnapul metal shuttle piece and dropped it down into the cavity since there's no insulation in the wall it was basically a free fall drop all the way down so i measured out about eight feet of the polyline by hand and then tied it off back down in my office i was then able to pretty easily find the magnapull shuttle with the magnet and then i drilled a hole below that point once the hole was drilled the magnet pull shuttle and the polyline came right through the wall and i was able to pull down that cat6 cable from the attic which i had attached to the polyline once i had the cat6 line in hand i terminated it to a cat 6 keystone jack and attached it to a single keystone wall plate [Music] back in the attic i terminated the other end of the cable to a cat stix keystone jack and then plugged it into the 24 port 1u cable matters keystone patch panel [Music] the cable tested out okay and so then i plugged it into the usw industrial and i was able to adopt the switch into unify and so that's where we are now at this point i'm feeling a lot more confident about my ability to sort of run cables through the house i've definitely learned a lot but there's still a little bit more to be done here i still need to cable manage the cable up in the attic a little bit better and i also still wanted to test out that cable ferret so before i button up the hole down here in my office let's take a look at that cable ferret and see if we can't get some pictures of the insides of my walls all right so i've got the cable ferret attached to the end of one of these push rods and we're going to go ahead and stick it in the wall cavity and i guess just see what we see as far as running wires for this particular house the cable ferret was not really that useful but i can definitely see it being useful in you know certain circumstances where you do need to get into some sort of wall cavity uh that you don't have access to so as we can see down here i have a wi-fi connection going from my phone to this device right here and we're just going to go ahead and start sliding it up into the wall and there we can see my wall cavity see if i can twist it around or anything uh and at some point we should up there we go wait i don't know if we can see that but all right that's about as far as i can get in there let's see if i can twist it around i'm trying to see the cable yeah so i don't really see the cable that i ran down it's probably because it's behind the cable ferret so i can't really see the cable and i think i'd have to get another push rod to actually see the hole at the top of the cavity let me take it back out and then i'm gonna see what it looks like going uh downwards instead of upwards all right there's the cable fare let's go down instead and if we look down uh we can see that basically we're gonna hit another like i wouldn't be there's no the cavity doesn't continue downwards so it's basically we can see that inside here yeah so straight down i'd have to drill down again if i wanted to get down into the first level of my home all right try going up one more time we're going to try a different angle this time up there's the cable so now we can kind of see the cable that's going through the wall cavity [Music] but i'm not really able to see much up the wall at all all right so pulling it back out now so yeah i mean there we can see the cable ferret definitely works but again it's not so useful at least not for what i'm using it for uh again if you're in the trade though and you think this would be useful for something that you do on a daily basis put that down in the comments below i'd love to see your thoughts on on where you think something like this cable ferret could be most useful [Music] all right now that those lines are pulled i've successfully laid the foundation for some network expansion around my home i've got some additional cross connects here in my office for testing equipment and i've got that cat6 cross connect up to the usw industrial switch in my attic that's going to allow me to fan out and do some other cable runs to areas around my house i've already got a lot of good ideas working where i can use that industrial switch most importantly though i learned about running cables through walls and at least now i know that running cables vertically through the walls isn't such a big deal as for these tools the push-pull rods are an excellent tool to have in your tool belt and i'm i'm actually sure i probably could have done most of this same work that i did with the magnapool with these rods so i'm really glad to have these in my arsenal now uh as far as the cable fare it goes the jury's kind of still out on the cable ferret in my opinion now it seems like a very useful tool in theory and it definitely works right i was able to get in and explore areas inside my walls that would have been hard to see otherwise but for my purposes it wasn't very helpful now your mileage may vary on that and again if you find the cable ferret useful or if you use it in your day-to-day activities let me know down in the comments below i'd love to hear about that to me though the star of the show is this magna pool now especially when you're using the magnapool with some of that lightweight polyline it was just a champ at going through the wall i mean even this exterior wall that was filled with insulation i can see myself using the magnapull a lot in the future so i do want to say a big thank you to techtoolsupply.com who sent me these tools to try out much appreciated and if you're interested in purchasing any of these tools head over to techtoolsupply.com and take a look at what they've got if you use coupon code chris10 at checkout i'll put that on the screen here you can get ten percent off any cable ferret or magna pull product and there's a few different variations you know the cable ferret comes on its own or it comes with the push pull rod as a kit and they're already on massive discount so this is ten percent on top of the discounted cable ferret uh pricing that's already out there okay that's gonna do it for this video make sure you subscribe to crosstalk solutions for more content just like this and if you enjoyed the video make sure you gently caress that like button my name is chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for [Music] watching

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 256,044

Rating: 4.8558335 out of 5

Keywords: crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, cable fishing, wall fishing, cat6 cable crimping, cat6 cable installation, cat6 cable tester, cat6 cable wiring, network cable installation best practices, network cable installation, network cable installation training, home network wiring, home networking 101, how to, cat 5, cat 6, ethernet cable, cat 6a, category 6 network cable

Id: VN1PTdOak6g

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020