Hide Your TV Wires Easily w/ PowerBridge like a PRO

what's up everyone it's be the installer and i'm here to show you how to hide the wires on your tv and home theater uh without actually having to cut into the electrical and get yourself electrocuted i'm going to be introducing the power bridge which is probably an a tool that most of you would feel more comfortable with installing in the wall versus the live wires i'm gonna go over quickly how to put the tv up and how to place the power bridge in the right spot might run into some obstacles in this instance i haven't even checked what's in the wall but because the power outlets are too far left and right it's pretty ideal situation to introduce the power bridge or an item like it been in the industry for quite a while so i think you're gonna get a lot out of the video so make sure stick around to the end smash the like button when it becomes useful and subscribe and ring the notification bell if you're not already subscribed to the channel let's get into it [Music] so first i want to go over the tools that we'll need for this job you're not going to need all the tools if your tv is already mounted but because the tv here is not mounted i'm going to quickly go over all the tools needed for the installation and the power bridge so i don't think i mentioned that i'm installing a 65 inch sony a90j oled on a mounting dream mount here it's like a 40 amazon mount that holds up just fine and i'm gonna have an apple tv and a sonos arc connected to it i'm gonna hang the sonos arc under the tv later so that won't be part of this installation so things that are most crucial right off the bat are you know writing utensils pencils are great um you'll need a tape measure to figure out where you are in the wall horizontally and vertically uh you'll need a level to make sure that you can level across the wall and then you'll definitely need you know drill bits and a drill of some sort i have milwaukee drill and a milwaukee powered screwdriver both are great then some of the other things that are pretty crucial stud finder the fish tape if you need to pull the wires down if there's insulation that could be a problem you'll definitely need a drywall knife to cut the drywall the hand saw is perfectly fine unless there's plywood which is something i will talk about and may you may run into and we'll figure that out uh and then a ratchet and socket set to put the bolts in on the tv um to make sure that the tv's secure against the walls so let's get up on the wall and figure out where the tv is going to be because if you don't know where the tv and the mount are going to be on the wall then there's no use in doing this power bridge beforehand so you got to get that stuff done quick i'll go through that real fast and then we'll get into the wiring all right so we're back up at top and i got the measurements on what we need to do here and i wrote them down because it's important it's very important to find out where everything is before you start so i have the center of this wall here which is 98 and a half inches from that side i measured it off the bed and the window here behind me and that comes to 98 and a half inches from this side this wall is shorter because there's the door on that side so mark that as center okay then i measured where i want the bottom of the tv to be and that is at 50 inches here we're going to have a dresser that's going to be somewhere in the range of 38 inches another foot you know if we want knickknacks on there or whatever you have to decide what you want to do there and then 50 inches it'll put the tv up in this range which is by a vent not super ideal but you know i don't want to have the tv too low and then from the tv to the mount is this 16 inch difference right here it's 13 and a half inches up to the brackets and then another two and a half inches from the brackets up to the top of the mount so you know you have to figure out where your amount and brackets hit so if you measure from the bottom of the tv to where the hooks clip on or the top of the bracket just make sure you know that exact measurement because the mount will now sit in this range right here and we have to work around that to make sure that the power bridge can sit in here and not be in the way of the mount so finding the studs is definitely relevant we have to know where those are in order to put our square power bridge in here right we don't want to cut right through a stud and then not be able to fit that in the wall but it's also relevant for the installation of the tv mount and you normally have like landmarks um right here we have a air vent so the air vent normally has a stud on the outside of it and that will give us kind of an understanding that there's going to be a stud right in this range here so i'll find the two studs real quick pop that on you want to put it on where you think a stud isn't and then rotate to where it is there we go so we have a stud right there i'll mark it as an s this is c for center and then now we know about 16 inches is where the next stud will be so those are two studs that i'll use for this job hitting both of these studs will actually get my center over here so it'll be a few inches off this mount has a little bit of wiggle room i could shift it back a little bit on the brackets here because my pattern isn't the full 400 by 400 so it can slide over a little bit that is important you know you got to make sure that you can get the tv where you want it in order for the power bridge and the wire management to be where you want it so i'm i should be good i'll be able to counterbalance the tv a bit um it doesn't always work that way so make sure you put this up first but now that i have the two studs i'm going to mark the top of the mount and mark the studs a little bit taller so that i can put the mount up here and they'll hit and i can make my measurements now that i have my mount here and the marks i can make sure it's pretty level here and then i'll make a mark on all four holes and if you're going to do this before you do the power bridge you can kind of draw the perimeter of the mount too and that'll give you a good idea of where not to put the power bridge so i could sneak it in a gap here i may not do that but i can't put it in this area unless it's going to miss the mount and you want to do something like that because if you end up putting the power bridge right there then you're going to have a mount covering it it won't work so right before i put the mount up i want to double check where i'm going to put the power bridge kind of relative to the tv because if i just put the mount up and then i have to work behind it it might be a little more difficult so i could put that power bridge in here because it's recessed as you can see here it's going to be really flat to the wall and with an arm mount you don't want that arm mount having to go back and hit your you know wire management or your power outlet but really it would just be kind of nice to just put it right in this area behind the mount so that's probably what i'm going to do but let's open it up and see if it'll fit so we have the actual dual power outlet and you know you can get this single one as well you don't really have to worry about how many power outlets you need because you really could just put an extension cord in here and then run that out and behind the tv you could plug in you know three or five things to you know a surge protector um i got the dual just because i i do need at least two i'll probably have three things i think it's the tv the sound bar and the apple tv uh but i'm not worried because i'll just plug it into an extension cord right here uh and i'll have three things but this is pretty deep it goes in your typical uh you know three and a half inch studs uh the bay that can fit that so it will fit depth wise it has these little flippers here that pull tight to the wall and hold the drywall there's two of them it would be nice to have four of them for a dual outlet like this and then you have the inlet on the other end which will be at the base of the wall and before they used to have where you had to actually do the wiring but now you just have a connection here where you just snap it into place and you're done so that's pretty nice if you have to go through something like a fire block that is not as easy with this being bigger and i don't know if i'm gonna have to run through a fire block we'll see that would be not really ideal for this situation but it could be done i probably could just drill a one inch hole and then that would go down through the one inch hole i think this will fit nicely behind the tv mount and i'm going to go figure out how big of a hole to make so that i can get this ready and this is great we actually have cutouts for the two holes so there's no guess work i'm going to go ahead and split these this is the the one that i need right now to see if this will fit behind the tv mount and then this is the inlet at the bottom that will be where we extend the power cord from to the wall so i'm gonna hold on to these don't lose these this is the exact size you need and we're gonna go up there and measure on the wall so as i said i have this cut out now the amount has about an inch bracket there so i'm going to miss that just like this make sure i'm going to be kind of in the middle because i know that it kind of curves at the top and the bottom so you can grab a level as well to square this up but you need to follow this cutout exactly you can be a little smaller than the cutout but if you're too big and it's bigger than the cutout then your power bridge will just fall on the wall so make sure that you mark this up and measure it exact around the edges but yeah definitely make sure that you cut this exact or a little small because if you cut it too big you're in big trouble and that requires drywall repair and you might as well just pick a different spot to put it in because you're not going to be able to succeed and then down below here we're going to measure and put it at the same height as a power outlet so it's about fourteen and three quarters so i'm gonna go directly below where the power bridge is so that we run into as few problems as possible and i'm going to measure and put this top at fourteen and three quarters which it is and then we'll mark that up as well so that we can have our cutout there and so that's exactly where our cutout is going to be for the inlet and now we can cut them both and see if we have a clear path from top to bottom all right so drywall knife again make sure you're exact i'm going to go ahead and just kind of dig it in and make sure that we have a clear path here you'll find out in a hurry if there's plywood behind there because it's not very easy to push through the plywood okay i did not have plywood it's in so now i'm going to go ahead and just make smooth back and forth cuts to get this square cut out get this top all right and now we're going to go down here and come back to the other side all right there we go that was pretty easy and i'm left-handed and this is my right hand so camera was set up this way i figured let's just get it done cut it wrong-handed still worked okay it wasn't very difficult so it was right next to a stud here that stud is where i thought it would be i probably should have gone a little bit more to the left but these clips are on the top and the bottom so it's not going to be a problem with the studs right there so now there's two things you could do one you could just go down there and cut the bottom hole but two you could put your phone in here upside down and shine the light down and make sure that you have a clear path to the ground that's very useful if you have a fire block uh and you're like i can't do this then at least you'd only have one hole to repair instead of two holes to repair so i'll take a peek real quick and make sure that i have a clear path or see what's down there so turn my camera on don't need a picture of myself all right turn the flash on and we can check it out a lot of spider webs down there and also there is definitely a fire block so not a great situation i will have to cut through that and that means you guys are going to get a little bit more than you bargained for and see how i would cut through a fire block boo so i can still cut the hole down there but i'm going to just get through this fire block first and the best way to do that is to measure where it is on the wall here so i'm just going to take my tape measure and stick it down the hole and find out how far down from this hole is that fire block so there you go it's about 11 and a quarter inch from this hole so i will just measure 11 and a quarter on the outside and scrape the wall right here and that is where the fire block is so we have our mark here and now what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to take a drill bit and i'm going to drill a one inch hole right in the drywall a couple inches above the fire block and then i'll show you how i drill through that at an angle to get us below that level and then we can fish our wire through that hole down to the bottom and we'll be good so it's going to take a little bit more work here but let me show you that process right now first i kind of angle the drill bit downward a little bit and i'll just drill it's got to be up above the fire block though because if you do it at the fire block you're going to run into it so i'm going to go about two inches above the fire block and cut oh this is a one and an eighth inch bit right now i'm going to make that hole all right so there's that hole and that's perfectly two inches above there and you can make the hole a little bigger if you need to just to get a little room in there so there we go and i'm going to fix this hole in a little bit it'll be really simple to fix i'll show you how to do that too now that i have this hole here i could do a couple different things one i could just use a larger bit than the actual harness that i have to send through so if i was just going to make one hole obviously i have to make it be a bigger hole than the harness that needs to fit through but because this is flat i also could take the one inch bit which is longer and i could go down and i could have a little bit more control over where i want to make this hole and i could put two holes next to each other and then fit the harness through the two holes which is what i'm gonna do there's also a case to be made to cut this area out above and below the fire black and then work and finish it and then put this drywall back in and fix the drywall but that's not very quick and it's not going to really work for this install i'm not going to take the next hour and show you how to do this so i'm going to actually use this one inch bit make two holes next to each other they got to be touching each other in order to get this harness down and then we're going to move on so there's the fire block and now i'm going to go ahead and get my drill bit in there at an angle and if you need more of an angle you can you know grind this out a little bit more right here and give yourself a little bit more vertical space which i can do right now so if i give myself a little bit more vertical space then i can make that the drill bit go straight down and i'll just drill straight down through the fire block [Music] [Music] all right so i'm through i cut through it uh there's two holes one in the back there and one in the front that hole right there ended up hitting um a nail so you got to be careful if you're close to the studs right here because the nails come sometimes out of the studs into the fire block so i'm through though and the important part is that i have a hole that is definitely big enough for that to go through so i can manipulate the power bridge wire through this hole down here and then eventually it'll come out down at the hole below and we can connect it over so that was basically how to get through a fire block now if you just need to get electrical through that you're good if you need to get hdmis through that maybe you have to make two holes one over here and one there um i think what a lot of people have a problem with is that they're concerned on how to fix this hole but realistically it's not that difficult to fix drywall and i'll show you that right at the end all right so we're good on the top and we're good at the fire block so we're going to cut this hole out and get this accomplished [Music] and i ran into the stud again there so we'll just go a little bit to the left again make sure that the hole is not too big but we're good if we just go over a little bit there we go so now we can get our wires in here so the next step will be getting the wire down here connecting it up and then pushing it back in the wall so let's go and start with the top first so let's check and see how much slack we have so this is a good six feet as my wingspan would tell us and we want to get it in here through that fire block hole and to the bottom now you could just drop it if there's nothing in the wall i do have that fire block which is a little tricky to navigate so we'll just hand feed this to the next hole because it's really close all right and we'll just set it up here right now i'm gonna eventually push it in and that hole might not be big enough we might have to go a little wider but we'll figure that out in a second let's see if i can push it down the hole and get it to come out at the bottom all right so with a little finagling down the wall i found it at the bottom and that is super awesome because that means we've made our route from top to bottom and yes we have some drywall to repair but we are done with this part so because i'm down here and i want to get this finished i'm going to go ahead and connect these uh two pieces they're opposites so you just go ahead and slide one over the other let's get this done all right push it on there we go it's locked in place and now we got to backtrack some of it in the wall in order for this to fit where it needs to go and there we go now if you want to avoid painting you can uh erase any mistakes that you may have made like i did there all right before we get too far here i have to remember that we have to put the hdmi cords in now be a lot more difficult to run the hdmi cords in later when we can't see anything right so i'm going to put one hdmi cord in so you guys can see how it's done i don't really need it for my purposes i'm going to have the apple tv hidden so really this is just a power solution for me power bridge but it does have this nice area where you can put your hdmi cords or whatever kind of cords you need to anything that's not high voltage you can't put the power cords inside the wall which is why we have this power bridge but i'll have to feed it into this hole down out of this hole back through the fire block and out the bottom so i'll just feed it from this hole first down to the hole i made for the fire block and then i can quickly feed it down the wall and i'll pull some slack down i want slack on the top and the bottom you can always use a zip tie to cinch it up at the top and the bottom and then down here there we go it just popped right out and we're good so we'll move that aside and first we will send it out the back of this inlet or whatever you want to call it pop it through there and give us some slack and now we're in a pretty good position to just finish this bottom part up because uh you know this is we're all finished down here we got some drywall on top to fix so let's go ahead and feed this back in it's good to keep this piece down here at the bottom if it ever disconnected or something happen you know you could always get easy access to it so i'm glad they made it that way we'll feed it over and we'll get this ready now when it comes to you know getting this box put inside the wall you have to remember you only have one of these boxes for the inlet so we don't want to snap this plastic if you get too aggressive with the power tool you can snap it so let's go ahead and put it in like that so i'm just going to finish off with this screwdriver and square it up a bit you know so it's it's level and then i'm gonna when i feel tension i'll stop uh tightening this so i don't snap that wire so there we go we had some tension there let's even it out with the bottom screw tighten this one up there we go nice and simple easy done you can pull on it to make sure that it's good and you know a little extra slack never hurts so now we'll go up to the top and finish the top section so up here we have our wire we have some excess we'll push that back in the wall because i'm going to fix that drywall and then now like i had said we can push the rest of this out the front of that box it's probably too much for the top i'll pull the rest of slack down through the bottom there we go so now we have you know four or five feet on the top and the bottom and let's go ahead and push it in all right good to go and now we'll tighten this up with a screwdriver again put a little tension on it there we go let's see does it need to be tighten a little more oh looks good uh you know as long as it's snug you don't want to over tighten it all right so we're good and we have the top box in the blower box done and now really we just have to fix this drywall but before i fix the drywall i want to make sure this actually works you can see maybe you can't see it but there's a little green light there i want to make sure it has power at least if we check it now we'll know we're in a good spot before we fix this drywall we have that power cord that came with this literally looks just like an extension cord uh and we'll plug this side in over here and then we'll plug this into the power outlet and you know right off the bat i can see we got a green light right there so uh we are good to go we have power on this end let's check the top quick up there you can see we also have power and i'm pretty stoked this project has gone pretty smoothly except for that sucker right not so much fun to have to fix drywall in the middle of a tv install but that's okay things happen we'll make quick work of that and down here you know this cord it's a little bit of an eyesore of course but you have to make these decisions are you willing to do the electrical or are you okay with seeing this wire or you know it being behind a dresser we're gonna have a dresser here it's not here yet uh it doesn't matter to me i'm fine with it once it's hidden so put a little zip tie on this hold it up put the dresser behind you you'll never see it all right so let's get this drywall fixed five minutes or less we'll be good to go to fix this hole here we need a few things we need some mud i have some fast light five i think it's called from home depot a couple drywall knifes a little pan to put the mud in then i have this box cutter type knife and what i'm going to do first is kind of cut the edges to make it nice and clean we don't want any of this loose drywall sitting there so i'm going to you angle it out and cut a little bit around it so that it's nice and clean there we go so now it's a nice clean hole there and we can just mud it so we'll grab some mud you know maybe a cup of mud or so a cup of the dust here and i'll go mix it up and i'll bring it back and show you how to get your first coat on there that's going to kind of plug that hole all right so i'm back and i have this mud it's nice and thick and now i can put it in the hole there and get my first coat to get the first coat in there is very important uh it'll you know once it's dry then you can flatten it out but i'm just going to go ahead and and make a mess of it kind of feed it into the hole now this hole is about as big as you can do this with but i swipe away from the hole on the top and the bottom and kind of just plug it up you can use some mesh if you think that it's not going to hold you know time after time this has been a perfectly good method for me it's never caused any issues all right so there you go the first coat of that mud is done and we can move on to putting the bracket on and putting the tv on i can always come back and fix this later we have our holes now we can fit the tv mount right over the top let's get that done quickly hang the tv and get our finished product so most of the tv mounts require a quarter inch hole so i'm going to use that at the larger ones anyways make sure you check with the tv mount you're using and get the proper hole we'll drill the top two holes so we can get it level if i drill all four holes then sometimes the mount isn't level so we'll do the top two first put those on and then we'll put the bottom ones in and to make this part go faster i have my socket and one half inch uh you know socket on on the end of this adapter that goes into my drill so one of those nice little tricks for us installers to make it go faster so let's go ahead and put the mount up i'll situate it in a second here just going to get it started [Music] pull this out get that hdmi cord out of the way before it gets destroyed all right and now we want to get it over as far as possible that way so i pushed it over and we'll tighten these two up so now i'm going to hand tighten it make sure it's level ish no you want it pretty level so raise that side up just a little there we go and now we'll tighten it the rest of the way there we go that side's good all right so there we go we're nice and level now that we're level i can drill the bottom two holes we'll angle them up a little bit so that you don't hit the bracket same on this side and put the bottom two in and then we'll hand tighten those as well just to make sure they're snug that one's good all right oh that is that's on there if it can hold my big butt it can hold the tv so all we have left to do is fix that drywall i'm going to do that later we're going to hang the tv up plug things in and to do that i need my trusty assistant the very popular gen to help me lift this tv up so i will go summon her okay so the power went out while i was getting gen so now san diego's out of power no it wasn't me i promised with the electricals that's why i'm not messing with the electrical so i got the big guns in as i had said we're going to lift the tv up put it up here and then make all the cords disappear let's do it go ahead oh just if we can go go yeah very good after lifting all those 83 inch tvs this is nothing it is actually quite light and this is the heavier of the 65s so oh i thought you said it was that easy easy easy peasy it's still only five feet tall yeah as i say the camera can see right over your head you jen you are released released peace all right now we just have to throw the power cord on and plug the hdmi in and we'll be set i'll turn it around and show you the clean look make sure you screw the safety pins in you don't want your tv to fall [Music] all right i'm all complete beautiful looking tv and what once looked like something like this with all the wires now clean just because i added the power bridge and got through that fire block and made it look nice so all good even below it looks nice and clean i'll i'll have a dresser to cover that power cord eventually and i'll have a sound bar here but as you can see the apple tv tv looks great i hope you enjoy the video make sure to smash the like button and let me know below if there's something that's preventing you from doing a job like this or questions you have definitely let me know make sure to subscribe and set the notification bell to all and just like that you can be the installer [Music] so [Music] uh so [Music]

Channel: B The Installer

Views: 1,320,365

Keywords: hide tv wires, hide tv wires behind wall, hide tv cords in wall, hide tv cords above fireplace, hide hdmi in wall, conceal tv cords, hide hdmi, add power outlet, powerbridge, power bridge, arc hdmi, how to add a power outlet, how to hide wires in wall, how to hide tv wires, PowerBridge TWO-CK Dual Outlet, PowerBridge ONE-PRO-6 Single-Outlet, fire block, fireblock, fix drywall, wire management, conceal tv wires, conceal wires, b the installer, tv installation, tv installers

Id: 1Qr9ZoL6iH8

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021