"Re-cabling" a brownstone?

Apologies in advance for the long-winded story: We have a brownstone in PS that we renovated about 7 years ago. We did a gut and had someone put in behind-the-wall cables for satellite, etc. The whole thing was a bit of a fiasco, almost from the start — one of the cable jacks apparently was not laid right and so we’ve never been able to get our Direct TV to it and the one that goes to our main TV screen has had trouble on and off for a while. Recently that main screen lost all connection to our dish and today when the DTV guy was here, we discovered that the cable that runs inside our walls from our 2nd floor front room (where the TV is) to the deck on the back of our first floor (where the cables of the sat dish meet the external connections for all the internal cables) has apparently somehow been corrupted. It actually had water in it — you could squeeze it out the insulation. Does anyone have a sense of what my options are? Is there any way to run cable inside the walls without completely ripping the house apart? Any thoughts would be most appreciated.

jkas

in Television 11 years and 2 months ago

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brucef | 11 years and 2 months ago

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How about taking a step back and thinking outside the box?. Some combination of surviving hard wiring and wireless should be more capable. You need a network design.

deanbh | 11 years and 2 months ago

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….yep…..put plastic “tubes” into the wall so next time you want to run cables you just pull them through on a draw string. As for how you do it this time……nope.

jkas | 11 years and 2 months ago

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Thanks, @dork. I talked to a guy today who said he’s done this sort of thing before and he described pretty much exactly the same process you did. Sounds messy but looks like the only option…

dorkofwindsor | 11 years and 2 months ago

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RG6 is hard to run because it is stiff and can kink. I am going through this at the moment with one of my cables, which i now see that a plumber scorched when brazing a connection. if your walls are sheetrock, you can cut drywall plugs to get into the wall and feed the cable through, hopefully only requiring a handful. you’ll want to try to pull through the new wire by attaching it to the old wire. it might be challenging (need 2 people) but it should be doable. make sure its not the connection and that you get the correct cabling (should be RG6 rated for in wall and exterior if necessary).

jkas | 11 years and 2 months ago

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*have* no idea

jkas | 11 years and 2 months ago

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Thanks for responding. I did think about that, and tried to get a sense of how free the cable was in the chase, but it seems fixed somewhere inside the wall (I suppose that makes sense as an installation procedure). I know idea how far in (or how often) it’s tied-off, stapled, etc btwn the entry point and the terminal.

Arkady | 11 years and 2 months ago

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Can’t you just link new cable to the old one & pull it through the chase?