Lyric Security System: Fishing Wire Through the Wall

All right. So, we're going to show you what's involved with trying to fish our wire from this hole here, up the wall, and come out that hole that we just made, which will be behind the panel so that this wire will not be visible. All you'll see is the panel on the wall and the transformer plugged into this outlet.

So we talked a bit about this power supply and how it works. And basically, as described, this outlet has a screw hole in the middle. So we remove this screw hole, and when we plug this in, this screw will replace that one that's there now, and this screw will hold this to the outlet so that when it's plugged in and screwed in, no one will accidentally unplug this, which would potentially drop power to your system.

Also, we talked about the length of this power supply. So you can see, when this is plugged in, this hole that we've made will be completely covered, which makes it for a nice installation. Because obviously, we need the hole to get our fish and because we made the hole big enough to be able to work with on the fish, we obviously don't want that hole to be visible. But the way that it works, when you're on the bottom plug, if your hole is right below the plug, because this hangs down, it makes for a nice blocking of the hole.

So we have some tape here, some electrical tape, and we want to just basically tape our wire to the end of our fish tape. And you want to tape it in such a way that no wire is exposed because you don't want it to snag on anything in the wall. But you want this nice and tight so once you get that fish in the wall, your wire doesn't come undone. So we're just going to wrap this a few times.

And so now we have a nice, smooth end, nothing that will catch in the wall and our wire is secure. So the idea is we put this in the hole and we come up the wall, and it will pop out in the hole behind the panel and therefore, we'll be able to pull our wire through and have a nice, clean installation without any visible wire. So this fish is a kind of a metal, flexible rod here, that we just insert.

And there is insulation in this wall. So if we feel it, the insulation has some paper which touches the drywall, and we want to try to get this behind that paper so we're not trying to fight through all the insulation in the wall up to that spot. If we can get in between the insulation and the wall, right in that little cavity, it should make for the easiest fish up into our other spot. And they call it fishing for a reason: because it takes patience and some finesse, but we'll see how we can do here.

So, when fishing, best made plans don't always come to fruition. We had planned for this smaller hole to be our entry point, and then our bigger hole up top to be where we'll have a little more give, so if we don't hit to the exact same spot we can just grab and pull it through. And what we're finding is because our outlet box is right above this hole, and because when we did our drywall saw hole here, the insulation got a little, not mangled, but it got a little bunched up.

So when we're trying to come at this angle, we're having to get in right above this outlet box. We're trying to hit at an angle and up, and then go up through there. And because of the nature of the fish tool, we're not really able to get it into a good angle because right now, it's shooting this way. If we try to get it to come this side of the box, it's not really going well. So instead of coming from here up, we're actually going to try the opposite.

So because of the insulation and not being able to really get this piece in between the drywall and the insulation, it was getting up into the insulation, it was getting jammed up. So, because our hole is a little easier to work with and see what's going on up top here, what we're going to do is...our insulation, you can see that it's got this paper. And this paper, as long as we're in between that paper and the drywall, there's a nice easy cavity for it to just slide down and come out that hole. So we're going to be shooting for a smaller hole.

The whole idea of the bigger hole at the exit point is a good idea, normally. But again, sometimes when you get into this, you find you run into snags and you have to change your plans. So, now, what we're going to do is slide it through the big hole and angle it down towards the outlet. We looked earlier and this fish tape is measured, so we knew anywhere from 23 to 25 feet, it's a 25-foot fish, so 2 to 3 feet down is where we should be near the outlet. So I'm going to just push it down. Try and angle towards the outlet because outlet is not directly below us and once I see that I'm approaching the 22-foot mark, which is right up here, I would know that I'm close.

I'm hitting something which I believe is my outlet box. So I'm either hitting the top of the outlet, or I've run into something else. But either way, I'm close. So I'm just going to pull this back out and try to shoot and hit just to the left of that, so I don't hit the outlet box and I instea,d come down the left side of the outlet box, so I can hit through my hole. And that time, I just used my fingers to hold my my fish tape so it would hit at a little bit more of a left-hand angle. And now the trick is just to get this to come out the hole.

Of course, we want to do this. This outlet, we have made sure has no power. You never want to be sticking your fingers around a live outlet. But with it turned off, I have both my fingers in here and I've grabbed the tape. If I can give just a little bit more slack here. You can see, working with such a small hole, why the theory of trying to hit to the bigger exit hole was a good one, but we're going to make do and...success. We have our wire, taped still to our fish, and we now have wire run through the wall. It's got easy play, and we have exactly what we need.

So all we have to do now is remove the tape, cut our wire, and then we can connect their transformer to this end, our panel to this end, and we'll have exactly what we need: wire through the wall, so it's not visible at all when the panel's installed. So, success, a little bit different than we originally planned, but now you can get a sense of what you'll be dealing with when you do your wire fish. And certainly, if you have questions, let us know, but that's how to do the wire fish.

All right. So we've un-taped our wire from our fish and therefore, we can just pull the fish tape out, wind this back up and we have our wire through our wall ready to proceed to the panel mounting to the wall. That fish is the most difficult thing you'll do on the Lyric installation, but with the right tools and the right idea of what you're doing, it's really not that difficult. You certainly don't need to hire anyone. Anyone with the right tools...and these are not expensive tools, easily available at Home Depot, Lowe's, something like that. So now that you know what you're going to do, anybody with the right tools and the right know-how can get that wire fished so it looks nice and neat.

And, of course, there are other ways that you could install this system. You could put the transformer in upside down on the outlet and put the wire exposed on the wall, and come in right through the back of panel and use some wire track. And you'd hide the wire, you'd have wire track showing, but that's a way to do it if you didn't want to try to do all of this.

There's even a desk mount option for the Lyric. So, we don't have it on this one yet for the beta, but they're going to have a little back angle mount so that it'll sit on a table and have a nice angle to use it. And then, of course, you're just plugging into a wall with an exposed wire. So if you had it in the office or something, that's another option. So there's plenty of options to install a Lyric without having to do all of this, but if you want to make it neat and you want to do it professional like this, this is the way to do it.