Hardwiring My home advice

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Hi everyone,

I am starting to plan out my home lab and the first job is to run the cables, I live in the UK with a plasterboard walls, I have a modern 2 storey home. 10 years old with no network cables run at all. I have FTTP and the ONT is on the ground floor in the living room. I have been using powerline adaptors but they are maxing out at 100Mbps, with packet loss, and latency on them is high. I get better latency on 5Ghz.

ATM, I want to wire my home myself connect to gaming pcs and consoles and POE cameras, and upgrade to Unifi AP’s.

I want to use flex bits, I need to go from the loft to the ground floor where my fibre ONT is. The distance from the outlet on the ground floor is about 5 metres or 16ft to the header in the loft. It is an external wall filled with fibreglass insulation. I want to drill from the header in the loft and down through the header on the 1st floor down through to the ground floor. I live in a detached home, and there are no firestops. I just need to get through the headers in both floors and pull a drawstring down.

I removed a Coax TV outlet, next to the ONT, I used rods to get to the header on the ceiling of the ground floor, the coax cable runs to an ariel in the loft, but it is tacked onto the stud, I was hoping to use it to pull a cable but it’s not possible. So, I need to make a new hole and route. I used an endoscope WiFi camera tapped to the rods to check the hole but its too small to feed another cable through.

I don’t have any firebreaks to drill through, just the header in the loft and straight down to the header on the 1st floor.

I want to ask if anyone has tried any of these bits with 2 extensions connected to them. I’m also struggling to find suppliers in the UK. I can get the bits on Amazon but not the extensions.

I watched Coreys video. There are no flex bits in the structured cabling Amazon link.

I am considering

Has anyone done this sort of thing tried to go from the loft to the ground floor?

How did it go?

What drill bits did you use?

Thanks in advance for any advice

Fran.

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Going through an external wall with fiberglass insulation can be problematic with long bits and extensions in my (limited) experience. I’ve found that the insulation gets torn up and tangled in the bit such that it won’t even drill when it gets to the far end header. I rather just cut rectangular holes in the wall near the top or bottom then use a flex bit to get through the header. I’m pretty good at patching holes such that no one can tell the hole was ever there, but YMMV. Existing cables, such as coax or builder installed networking are almost always stapled to the studs so using them as a pull cord doesn’t work, at least in my area. When I do a run down a wall, I always leave behind a pull cord so that if I need to run another data cable or two in the future, it’s easy to do. The long extension bits do work well on interior walls that don’t have insulation or difficult obstructions like horizontal pipes. Always a good idea to run a camera down and look around (like you did) if you are not certain what is in the wall.

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I second cutting holes in the sheet rock, the fiberglass is going to get wound up on the drill and cause a real problem. The flex bits that are like 10 feet long can be really hard to use because they tend to whip a lot, would certainly be my last choice of tool to use.

That said, can you drill a hole big enough to put a piece of plastic or metal conduit through, then feed the long drill bit through that conduit to get the farthest hole created? That might prevent the fiberglass from wrapping around the drill.

I have a bunch of work like this that I need to do, but time and other issues have stopped me so far. But this summer I need to run cables for cameras and wall work is going to be one of the tasks to get all the runs down to the NVR. Need to bury some cable too, which is rarely fun.

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I attempted to use the same sort of bit when going between floors of my house along exterior walls. It ended up being impossible to drill straight down without opening large holes in the wall, which I was trying to avoid. I ended up trying to bend the bit as I went. I ended up sinking the bit into the wall so hard that I couldn’t pull it out. I actually ended up breaking the rod trying to yank out the bit, $50 down the drain. That bit is still buried in my wall. Ended up simply opening the wall upstairs and downstairs and drilled between the floors with a normal drill and bit.

I should have just done that from the start.

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I still have a drill bit buried in the root of one of my molars from a failed root canal. Every time the dentist sees it on the x-rays he say, “Oh, yeah, that.” Very reassuring.

I second the idea about putting a tube/conduit through first and drilling through that. I just did it on an angle drill from my upstairs office down into our family room, which is offset by a couple feet and filled with fiberglass, and it worked really well (although I was only going 3-4 feet total distance).

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