CAT6 Wall Fishing

Five or six weeks ago I made a video called "it was one of my series on the road." I think it was number eight and in that video I had a problem trying to remove one of those unified access points from the

wall

and it just wouldn't come off the

wall

until I found this tool. This is the unifi type of device removal tool and of course the right tool for the job is always the best choice. This came from a company called techtoolsupply.com and after I posted that. video, even though they didn't know I was actually going to promote them in that video, it was something that happened organically, they got a lot of traffic to their website and they wondered where this traffic is coming from, so they reached out. to me when they realized and said, hey, listen, if there are other tools that you want to try, let us know and of course, I love tools, I love different tools, especially tech tools, and since I've run out to move to this new one.

At home, I have a lot of cables to pull. This house basically has coax everywhere, but it has a very nice attic and if I have the right tools, I can replace many of the coax connections in this house with some good Cat 6 wiring. 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 kind enough to provide me with a coupon code for several special offers that I will be doing. I have details about the screen here and below in the description.

So what did they send me first? I'll start again here. This is the great pool. Okay, so this is a way to run wires through a wall with a magnet. Basically, it's very simple, you have this incredibly strong magnet here and then you have this kind of metal shuttle right here that can go through the wall. This is a very strong magnet, as you can see, so you basically put this on. your wall and then you stick the magnet part to the outside of the drywall, it magnetizes and then rolls down the wall, so you can basically pull the wires that are attached to the end of this thing down the wall So what's in this? kit of course we get the little metal shuttle here we have the very strong magnet keep it away from the old school hard drives and then you get some looks like chains not sure exactly what you would use the chains for let's see if they have hooks or something like that, no it's just a chain so I'm not exactly sure what the chain is about but this should allow you to pass things through drywall.

It should also, oh, it says Jack Chain Wall Drop, so no. a cable installer, a lot of this stuff is new to me, what I'm going to use this for is running it through the wall to run the cables through the wall, it's also good for under the carpet so if you want to run under carpet this magnet works great and comes with this instruction sheet that gives several instructions for a cavity wall dropping an insulated wall dropping a steel stud while dropping under the carpet and then the drop cat chain wall drop, which again I don't know what that is, but uh you know I will if I ever find myself in a situation where I have to do a cat chain wall drop, okay then that's the first tool, the second tool, the second tool is also pretty impressive, let me leave this out, so this is a kit.

The cable ferret kit comes with the cable ferret which we'll talk about in a second and it also comes with a sort of standard sway rod kit. This one was a little damaged during shipping, but these are just for you. you know the plastic rods made to go down the wall won't hurt these things at all they are perfectly fine so this is the wire push and pull game this is a 30 foot kit and it has a couple different heads so that you already know how to do it. Sure you can get through insulation and stuff like that, that's pretty standard, although what's not standard is the ferret wifi cable, this thing is pretty slippery, so what this is is this little guy here now, it's got a battery inside you.

We can charge it with USB type C and then we have a light, okay, and it's a camera and it's a very small camera, so the idea here is that it has these connectors to go to the push rod and then you can stick this on. into a cavity where you can't reach or where you can't see and then you can use your phone to see the camera feed over Wi-Fi, so this is a very, very useful tool, it also comes with a number. kind of accessories here, let me turn off the light so as not to waste battery, so it comes with a number of accessories.

This is a telescopic rod, so if you want to turn a corner, you can put it on. The end of this rod right here then we have another standard rod that can be attached to the front of this thing and then it comes with some adapters for the push rod. These look like male to female adapters. It has a hook that you can tie. on the front here and it also has a magnetic attachment, so if, for example, I was working with this ubiquity tool and I dropped it in a crack somewhere, I can use my push rod with this camera, the magnet is connected to the end of the camera and I can go down and we can retrieve that tool, okay, that's cool, I think it will actually also work as larger tools, like a screwdriver, yeah, look at that well, so if you're careful, I do not think it does.

It looks like it will come off pretty easy, but if you're careful, you might even be able to grab something like a screwdriver from a crack somewhere that's really clean. Cable Ferret also has a really fun installation video or use video at techtoolsupply. com, if you're going to watch that, I laughed a couple of times at the video of using this thing, it's really funny, so before I start using any of these tools, I want to start with "I'm not." an expert at pulling wires, I don't run wires through walls for a living, I've never done that for a living, I'm a novice at running wires through walls, so with that being said, don't take this as an instructional video, but if you are going to take anything from this video learn from my mistakes, rather than teaching you through the mistakes I make, in other words, one thing I firmly believe in is that having the right tools for the work makes a big difference. and it brings you much closer to success, so I'm very glad to have these tools.

I'm going to start playing with this cable ferret and seeing if I can get some video of the inside of my walls and then I'm going to try to run a line. I have a couple of spots here in the corner where I want to run a line in my attic and from my attic I'm going to run my usw industrial switch on the wall and then from there I can make fan connections to other areas of the house so It will be a great project. I'm not going to finish it all in this video, but I want to start and I wanted to show it. you guys these tools because I'm so excited to just play with them let alone use them successfully so okay all that being said let's get started so yeah a lot of mistakes were made now instead of forcing you to watch all of these painful lessons.

For my part, I thought it would be a better idea to just do a voiceover and cover everything I learned, so the first area I wanted to run some

cat6

cables was right here in the corner of my office, I wanted two cat cables six. from the floor to this unused electrical box near the ceiling, I'll use it for an office camera and then the spare connection will be for, you know, test equipment, access points, cameras or whatever I'm testing, like this which I started by opening up the box at the top that used to have a coax connection and an RJ11 phone connection, I cut out both and then drilled a hole in the bottom to run the new

cat6

cables through.

I wanted to do some testing with the cable ferret with fi camera, but since this is an exterior wall, it's just full of insulation, so I couldn't really get the camera very far into the hole. We'll come back to that ferret cable a little later. My first mistake when trying to run cables through this wall, I tried to run two cat6 cables directly first with the magnet and then using the rods on the wall, since I wanted to run two cat6 cables simultaneously, I took out enough length of cable and then double. I half attached the bent section to the magnetic pole with electrical tape and then tried to get it up to the wall, but with the insulation on the wall it just didn't work, the resistance of the wires trying to get past the insulation was too much. for the magnapull I then tried using the wall rods and this actually worked well as I was able to run the wall rods through the insulation but still made the mistake of trying to run the cat6 cables through the wall connected directly. up to the wall bar, they only went part way up the wall and then I pulled on them a little too hard and the wires disconnected from the wall bar, which made me hit my hand on the ceiling and actually hurt me.

I removed some skin. On one of my knuckles, you can see a band-aid on my finger and some of the later pictures here, after I slammed my finger into the ceiling, I realized that I was missing something and that some of it was polyline, so instead of pulling wires through the wall straight, man. It's much easier to run a light polyline through walls, instead once the polyline was through I was able to connect the cat6 cables to the polyline and they went through the wall very easily, so here we have the polyline with a double knot.

The back of the magnetic pool shuttle part we're going to stick on the wall down here and we're going to grab it with the magnet. Now I can feel it's there, so let's start pulling up. slowly and as you can see it's going through the wall and of course you can feel if it comes loose which so far it hasn't and I have a lot of slack here so there's no resistance in the line when I do it. I had done this with just regular cat 5 or cat 6 cables, there was too much resistance from the cat6 cables and it didn't work, so I'm using this poly line which of course is much lighter than a cat6 cable and seems to pull straight at through the wall no problem, so I've got it up there and I should be able to pull it out the top, there we go, so now that I have my first line, I can already tell this would work.

Much better if you had two people, one person feeding the cable and another person you know pulling the other end. Unfortunately, it's just me today, so yes, I have to go back and forth from top to bottom. to straighten out the bottom wires and make sure they're feeding properly, yeah, so we ran two wires through and now I'm going to cut this off here and then I'm basically going to tie them up for now because I'm not going to finish them off right away. I want to get the next set of cables going even further into the attic.

I want to finish them first before I finish these and close everything. Now we come to the next one. Big mistake, one of the goals I had for this project was to get some type of network connectivity here in my attic. In this case, I am using the industrial usw. This is a great switch and you should be able to handle it. I know more extreme temperatures, you know, super cold in the winter and super warm in the summer in my attic environment, but from here I can take an inlet and vent it throughout the house and distribute cat6 more easily to other areas that I also had.

I took the time to build and paint this board for the switch and any other components I wanted to have here. This 1u24 port keystone patch panel comes from cable issues and I will be sure to have a link to this as well as All the equipment I use in this video is in the description below so it was pretty easy to assemble the board and the switch here, but from that spot in my office I thought I could use the rods on the wall to push another piece. of polyline through the wall and straight into my attic, but what ended up happening is I got three or four minutes of footage of me poking around at the bottom of a 4x4 stud that covers the wall cavity at the top, which I'm pretty sure.

It's standard when it comes to homes built with wood frames and drywall, there's just no way to run a wire through the top of a wall cavity without drilling a hole and the way it sits my ceiling and the way these air conditioning ducts sit there is realistic. There is no easy way to get to that exterior wall and drill a hole in the wall cavity. I mean, you could do it if you absolutely had to, but in my case I went with plan B, which was to move where my cross connection ends in my office to a section of wall that's much easier to reach than the outside wall where I passed my first set of cables it's right here behind me now from this wall I can't go up to the attic because there is a ridge above the cavity wall and I can't go down from the top to drill a holebecause there really isn't an easy way to access this exterior wall from above in the attic, so if we go off this wall to this side wall here and go six feet up, it's much easier to access from the attic and as a benefit additionally, there is no insulation on this interior wall, it's just an empty wall cavity and basically a free fall down, so what I had to do here was the first measurement to find the interior wall I wanted to use for the cross connection on my attic I basically found that interior wall first and then removed some of the attic insulation to clear a path to the 4x4 that finishes the interior wall cavity.

I also used a piece of plywood to close the gap between the cross beams in the attic to have a more stable platform to work from once I knew where to drill, I used a three quarter inch drill bit to drill the 4x4 once I had it I went all the way through, then attached a polyline to the magnapul metal. shuttle piece and dropped it into the cavity, since there's no insulation in the wall, it was basically a free fall all the way down, so I measured about eight feet of the polyline by hand and then tied it back up in my office.

I was then able to quite easily find the magnapull shuttle with the magnet and then drilled a hole below that point once the hole was drilled the magnetic shuttle and polyline went through the wall and I was able to pull down the cat6 cable from the attic that I had connected to the polyline once I had the cat6 line in hand I terminated it into a cat 6 keystone jack and plugged it into a single keystone wall plate in the attic I terminated the other end of the cable into a cat stix keystone jack and then I connected it to the 24 port 1u keystone patch panel, the cable tested fine and then I connected it to the industrial usw and I was able to adopt the switch on unify and that's where we are now.

At this point, I feel much more confident in my ability to run cables around the house. I've definitely learned a lot, but there's still a little more to do here. I still need to manage the cable in the attic a little better and I also wanted to test that ferret cable so before we patch up the hole here in my office, let's take a look at that ferret cable and see if we can take some photos of the inside of My walls are okay, so I've got the wire ferret attached to the end of one of these push rods and we're going to go ahead and stick it into the wall cavity and I guess we'll see what we see as far as running the wires through.

For this particular house, the wire ferret wasn't really that useful, but I can definitely see it being useful in certain circumstances where you need to get into some sort of cavity in the wall that you don't have access to so we can. Look down here, I have a Wi-Fi connection going from my phone to this device here and we're going to go ahead and start sliding it towards the wall and there we can look at the wall cavity to see if I can turn it. around or something uh and at some point we should go up there let's wait I don't know if we can see that but okay that's as far as I can get there let's see if I can turn it I'm trying to see the cable yeah so I don't really see the cable that I went through, it's probably because it's behind the cable ferrule so I can't really see the cable and I think I would have to get another push rod to really see it. the hole at the top of the cavity let me take it out again and then I'll see what it looks like going down instead of up okay there's the cable fee let's go down and if we look down we can see. that we're basically going to hit another one like I'm not, no, the cavity doesn't continue down, so we can basically see that in here, yeah, so straight down that I would have to drill again if I wanted to go down. to the first level of my house, okay try going up one more time, this time we are going to try a different angle, there is the cable, so now we can see the cable going through the wall cavity, but I can't really see a lot on the wall so take it out now so yeah I mean there we can see the cable ferret definitely works but again it's not that useful at least not what I'm using it for uh again.

However, if you are in the business and think this would be useful for something you do daily, please write about it in the comments below. I'd love to see your thoughts on where you think something like this cable ferret could work. It will be more useful now that those lines have been disconnected. I have successfully laid the foundation for a network expansion around my home. I have some extra cross connections here in my office for testing equipment and I have that cat6 cross connection. to the usw industrial switch in my attic which will allow me to spread out and do other cable runs to areas around my house.

I already have a lot of good ideas about where I can use that industrial switch, most importantly, although I learned about running cables through walls and at least now I know that running cables vertically through walls is not a big deal, since for these Tools The push-pull rods are a great tool to have in your tool belt and I'm actually sure I probably could have done most of the same work that I did with the Magnapool with these rods, so I'm very happy to have them in my arsenal now. As for the cable rate, the jury is still out.

In my opinion, the cable ferret now seems like a very useful tool in theory and it definitely works well. I was able to go in and explore areas within my walls that would have been difficult to see otherwise, but for my purposes it wasn't. very useful now your mileage may vary on that and again if you find the cable ferret useful or use it in your daily activities please let me know in the comments below. However, I would love to know. the star of the show is this magnapull now, especially when you're using the magnapull with some of that light polyline, it was a champ at getting through the wall, I mean even this outside wall that was full of insulation, I can see myself using the magnapull a lot in the future, so I want to say a big thank you to techtoolsupply.com who sent me these tools to try out.

If you are interested in purchasing any of these tools, head over to techtoolsupply.com and check out what they have by using coupon code chris10 at checkout. I'll put it on the screen here. You can get ten percent off any ferret cable or magna pull product and there are a few different variations, you know ferret cable. Does it come on its own or does it come with the push rod as a kit and they already have a big discount so this is ten percent on top of the discounted ferret cable price that is already available okay that will be enough for this video .

Be sure to subscribe to Crosstalk Solutions for more content like this and if you enjoyed the video, be sure to gently tap the like button. My name is Chris with Crosstalk Solutions and thank you very much for watching.