I am installing a second Sky box in my dad’s house – the cable and LNB are already there from a previous multi-room installation, I just need to route the existing cable from downstairs to upstairs.
The Existing Sky Cable
Here is a schematic of my dad’s house.
The red line shows the location of the existing Sky cable going neatly down the side of the house and into the front room through a hole in the wall.
The cable is neatly pinned to the wall using suitable cable clips, parallel with other neatly pinned cables for the Virgin Media facilities and a standard roof-mounted TV aerial. Overall, it is a pretty tidy job all round.
Anyway, I explained to him that all he had to do was drill a hole in the same horizontal position on the house – but into the upstairs bedroom just above the skirting board. We could then unclip the existing cable as far as needed up the wall, thread it through the hole, and then I would route it neatly along the skirting board inside the house to the planned location of the second Sky box in that room.
The Proposed Cable Routing Plan
This schematic on the right shows the simplicity of the planned cable routing operation. Red line = cable outside the house, yellow line = cable inside the house.
Now, at this stage of the story I should also explain that the wall above the door and ground floor windows of my dad’s house is pebbledashed – small white and terracotta/red stones embedded in mortar. You’ll see the relevance of this in a moment.
I saw my dad this morning and he was getting ready to drill the hole. I went off to work, and when I went back around 4.30pm I saw that he had finished the job. As I went in he said “we might need a junction box because the cable isn’t long enough”. I wasn’t sure what he meant, because I knew that there would be enough cable to reach the location of the Sky box.
The Finished Job!
This third schematic shows what he had done. He had decided to drill the hole close to the place where the Sky box is located. This meant that outside the house there was a sagging arc of cable from the point on the house where it was properly routed and pinned into the hole he had drilled the other side of the upstairs window.
It looks a bloody mess! I told him he may as well get a few old cars to dump in the front garden and buy a Staffordshire Terrier.
One thing that just doesn’t work is a solid, geometric shape or line cutting across the random surface of a pebbledashed cladding. It sticks out like a sore thumb, whether you’ve pinned it or not. And to make matters worse, where I said to drill the hole just above the skirting, he misjudged it and went straight through the bloody skirting.
Anyway, cutting a long story short – and without detailing the argument which ensued – he is going to do it the way I told him to tomorrow.