Uncommon Tricks to Fish Wire Through Walls and Ceilings Quickly | How To

hey y'all welcome back to the channel adam here and today i'll be showing you some of the best techniques at least that i found for me personally to install new wiring or run new wiring into a wall ultimately installing maybe a new light switch box or an outlet box whatever it may be and for some diys this can really be a daunting task that you're having to try and figure out how are you going to get that wiring from a to b there's also the thoughts of what obstacles might you run into in the wall and then of course you also have to put a hole in the walls but i built this mock-up wall here hopefully to give you guys a little bit better visual as to what's actually happening in behind the wall as you're trying to fish wires from usually your attic into a new box and having this mock-up is also going to be able to allow me to show you different situations that i don't have in my actual house like having a basement how to run wires down from there up to a box so let's go ahead and jump right in let's go all right so first thing of course that you're going to want to do is figure out approximately where on the wall you're going to want your new switch or outlet box so you know approximately i want mine to be in here so then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to take my stud finder along the wall now obviously this is the end of this mock wall i know that there's a stud there but for everybody else's sake just take your stud finder up along there figure out where your studs are that way you're not cutting a hole into your studs themselves and then once you've found a stud make sure to mark where it is so that you don't cut a hole into that stud so now that i know that i've got a stud right here now i'm going to take my box i'm going to put it up fairly close to where that stud is and then i'm just going to trace out my box now one thing to think about before you start cutting a hole in the wall is you do want to have an idea of whether or not there's any wiring in behind there or any plumbing behind there so as you're cutting your hole out don't go too deep just try to keep it as shallow as possible with the blade so as to not cut anything now another tool if you like to be as efficient as possible that can make quick work of this is a multi-tool and if you don't already have one of these you need to buy one because you can use this for all different kinds of projects and situations now this is where things start to get fun so i need to figure out how i'm going to get my wiring now to this hole here so let's pretend that the top of this wall is the ceiling and the bottom is the floor so what i would typically do then is i'd go straight up from my box if i'm coming in from the attic if i go straight up from the box i'm going to take a drill i'm going to take a 1 8 inch drill bit and i'm just going to drill a hole in through my ceiling so it's just going to leave a tiny little hole that's really easy to repair you'll never know that it was there after this is all done and then after i drilled my hole in the ceiling then i would take a little piece of wire i like to use white because it's easy to spot and you'll probably want to use something that's a little bit longer than this especially if you have blown in insulation you won't be able to see it but once that hole is drilled into the ceiling right above the box i would stick this wire through the hole so that it sits there and when i get up into the attic i just look for that wire i know exactly where the outlet is and where in the top plate i need to cut a hole to run my wiring down into the cavity now in this case i actually had to drill a hole through my drywall and into my top plate in my framing just to give you guys a simulation as to how this is going to kind of look if i actually had a ceiling here i would have made my hole in the ceiling itself just in front of the wall here and then run my wire up in there all right so now i'm up here in the attic and here is my wiring that i ran through from down below signaling exactly where i need to drill my hole so i'm just going to come straight in from this wire on my top plate and drill a hole straight down through the 2x4 so that i can run my wiring down into the wall cavity now i'm going to be using a three-quarter inch bit in order to do this this will leave plenty of room for the wiring to be able to run down through it without taking away from the structural integrity of the two by four all right so now i've got my hole drilled i'm ready to run my wiring down and in this case since i never installed a box down below i've got a big hole down there it'd be pretty easy to if i even i just ran the wiring down without using any fish tape or rods or chain or anything like that i'd probably be able to find it as long as while i'm pushing it down through there it doesn't get all bent up and of course that would probably work if the wall cavity is empty like this one like on an interior wall but in this case i like to use this chain here this is easy to find it's inexpensive it's easy to bend it's fairly strong and what i really like about it is i like to have gravity as my friend so when i put it down through the hole hopefully as long as everything is lined up it should just be dangling down around where my box is going to go in or if i already have a box in place it should be right around where the box is and i should be able to then fish it through the box pretty easily now this chain would not work if this is an exterior wall and there's insulation in the wall in that case i would definitely recommend using some fish tape or something like that to be able to push down through the insulation to get down to where the box is going to be going in or it already is i will then take my chain and i'm going to use some electrical tape to wrap around the end of the romex and i definitely want to wrap around it numerous times in order to make sure that it's not going to come loose in the wall that's one of the last things you want to do is while you're pulling it down it comes loose and then you have to go back up into the attic and start all over again with this process all right so now i've got my chain taped to my wiring i'm going to run down through so now i'm going to go downstairs and pull it down to the box all right so as you can see this is ideal you can see that the chain is just dangling right here i can pull it right through this hole and then just pull the wiring right down with it out of this wall here and i can put it into my new box but for some of you maybe you already have your box installed and it's not as easy as just being able to reach through this hole locate it and pull it through so let's go ahead and simulate that and put this box in place so while i'm doing that now it's time for an obnoxious self-promotion head if you're finding this video be helpful or interesting please do me a big favor and hit that thumbs up button right down below it really does help the video out to spread to more people and therefore maybe it can help them out as well i really appreciate it let's get back into it all right so now that this box is in place now we're trying to figure out how can we get the wiring run into this box that's already here well what you can do is you can take some wiring and make a hook out of it and then if you see these tabs in the back we're just going to run the hook through one of those tabs into the wall and we're going to try and hook the chain now i might take a little while to figure out exactly where that chain's at but once you do start feeling it with the hook and you will be able to feel it then you just wrap try to wrap it around it just spin the hook and hopefully that will wrap the chain around it to where then you can pull it down inside of the box all right so now we've got our chain through now i can start pulling my wiring down into the box and of course if this box wasn't here if this was completely new which i would advise not putting a box in it would just make it even easier to pull your wiring down in and so now i've got my wires fed into my new box so that seemed pretty easy to do right well some of you might not have your electricity running through your attic you may not even have access to your attic maybe your electricity comes from down in your basement or through a crawl space underneath of the house so i'm going to show you really quickly how i would go about doing that or if you wanted to continue on electricity say it's coming from the attic and it comes into this box and then you want to run it down to then a floor down below this would be the same process all right so we've got our new box up here and so let's move the camera down facing the bottom so let's say that down here at the bottom this is the floor and maybe we've got a baseboard that's running across here down here at the bottom so then what i would do in order to when i'm down in the basement or underneath to figure out exactly where my hole needs to be i'll do the same thing as i did in the ceiling except for i'm actually going to drill into the wall here and through my bottom plate to get down to where i need to be so i would not even take the baseboard off because it's really easy to fix up with caulk then after i got my hole drilled then i would insert that wire like i did before and that will act as our flag for down below all right so now here down below this would be about what our view would look like from down here in the basement or a crawl space so now you see this wire coming through flagging us to tell us exactly where we need to put that hole so we'll just come in from that wire and drill a hole going up into the wall cavity so now this time i'll take my chain instead of feeding it to the box i'm going to feed it from the box down towards the base plate and if i get lucky it may even go through the hole that was made down in the base plate but that is highly unlikely now something that you may want to do is measure how far it is from the box down to the floor and then add a decent amount to that measurement and then take that measurement and put a piece of tape on the chain at that measurement so then that way you know once you reach that piece of tape in the box feeding it through the wall you know once you reach that piece of tape that you have plenty of chain down the wall because it would really suck to go down in the basement and especially a crawl space just to find out not enough was let down in there and would you look at that we did get lucky and it went straight down through the hole down underneath but that's not normally going to happen so we're just going to pull this back up here and set it down just like this so we can show how to pull it through the hole all right so i'm just going to use the same hook that i made that i used to fish the chain into the box just going to put it up through the hole and then i'm just going to spin the wire around and see if i can't feel that chain because if i spin enough times eventually i'm going to have tension on it or i might feel it knock up against it which i think i'm feeling it now so i'm just going to go ahead and try to pull this back down and sure enough here comes the chain with it all right so now same thing as before i'm going to take the electrical tape and tape the mess out of this to that chain so let's go ahead and feed some of this wire up into the hole so now the wiring is taped really well to the chain now i'm just going to go ahead and pull it up the wall and into the box and so now i've got my wires fed into my new box now if you like electrical type videos i've done quite a few electrical projects in the past i'll post links right over here that you can click on in case you're interested in them i hope that some of this was helpful for you and if it was please let me know by giving the video a thumbs up and of course if you have any questions or comments at all you can leave those down in the comment section down below and i'll catch up with y'all in the next one see ya

Channel: How To Home

Views: 1,043,854

Keywords: electrical, home improvement, do it yourself, fishing electrical wire, how to run wires through walls, how to, how to run electrical wire through finished walls, how to run electrical wire, how to fish wire through wall, fishing wires, wire fishing, how to fish wires, how to fish wires through walls, running wires through existing walls, how to run wires, how to fish wires through ceiling, how to run wires through ceiling, how to fish wires from attic

Id: rQWTiD2LOjI

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022