Running a coaxial cable under the floorboards

[jackbirdy412]

Hello everyone,
I'm new here, about to undertake my first DIY project. I want to run a coaxial cable for Virgin TV from the front upstairs room of my house where the socket is, right through to the back of my house upstairs where I want the box to be. How would I go about doing this? The cable must run through the upstairs front room, onto the landing, down six stairs, up another two stairs and along the corridor into the back room. It looks as though I'm going to have to take off all the upstairs transition strips to get the carpet up, but I don't particularly want to have to replace them. I also don't particularly want to have to take up all the carpets and displace all the furniture, so is there any way to run the cable with the least hassle? PS I have included a diagram for reference.

Untitled

• jackbirdy412
• 23 May 2012
• 1

Thanks for all your help!

jackbirdy412

 

[snico]

Can you not go through the loft/attic using a thin cable conduit from original socket to ceiling....then back down into the room using cable conduit?

 

[jackbirdy412]

Unfortunately not, I have considered this but there is (conveniently ) no attic above either the front or the back room. It's only above all the other rooms, so running via the attic isn't a possibility.

Thanks

 

[snico]

Looks like the only way then, is the way you dont want to go

unless you can run the cable on the outside of the house?

 

[jackbirdy412]

No, it's a terraced house, and there's no conceivable way I can get the cable through the exterior walls.

How would I fit the cable with the least mess or hassle?

Thanks

 

[Mw Roofline]

Coax? Are we back in the 90's?

You need to run a couple of Cat5e cables in mate with a hdmi extender on the end. HD and 3D whenever you need it.

 

[jackbirdy412]

I'm not really into that, I just want the basic Virgin box to be in the spare room at the back, but I don't particularly want to uproot all the furniture. I've allocated a day to do this tomorrow, so I just wanted to know how to do it without ripping all the carpets up and damaging everything - although it doesn't look like this is possible.

On another note, how do I remove the transition strips? They're all carpet-carpet except one which is carpet - lino. Can I just use a crowbar? Or will they bend? (They're all metal.)

Thanks

PS - Sorry, it's not a coax cable, it's an RG6 7mm cable

 

[joe-90]

If it's a terraced house then the heating people will have taken the boards up (badly) at some time in the past so just follow the route of the pipes.

 

[jackbirdy412]

How would this work on the stairs though? The pipes would be along the right hand side wall, so eventually I'd have to cross over on the stairs meaning I'd have to take all the hallway carpet up

 

[joe-90]

You won't get around a house with the carpet down. It would have saved me bloody hours of every day if you could.

 

[jackbirdy412]

Alright, then - I'll see what can be done - this is going to be a blooming nightmare, considering there are also stairs that this carpet connects to and it's going to be impossible to do if I have to remove the entire carpet, I might end up running it along the skirting which will look awful but at least we'll have TV.

Thanks a lot for all your help.

 

[alumni]

No, it's a terraced house, and there's no conceivable way I can get the cable through the exterior walls.

Why not?
Virgin managed to get them in didn't they?

 

[Mw Roofline]

Iirc you loose about 7db for every hundred feet of cable. If the digital signal pixellates buy a booster from ebay. Good luck

 

[jackbirdy412]

Why not?
Virgin managed to get them in didn't they?

Yeah, they did - they drilled through the downstairs front exterior wall to put the TiVo in, and then drilled through the upstairs front exterior wall to install the socket where I want to connect this new cable to. It wouldn't make any sense to be drilling through walls in this situation as there's nowhere I can drill through the wall to feed the cable through to the back. Plus I'm not comfortable with drilling through walls and it seems a hell of a lot of hassle to be doing it.

you loose about 7db for every hundred feet of cable

I'm only running 25m of cable, presumably this should be fine?

Thanks again

 

[Sam Gangee]

Assuming that Virgin uses UHF frequencies and that you are using WF100 cable (not some cheap "low-loss" aerial cable) then 25m will lose around 4dB max. I.e, around 60%.

Chances are good that this won't matter, although, in theory, you should get Virgin to come and adjust the signal level - especially if it's carrying broadband.