Snaking thru Sheetrock for camera wires.

Installing wires thru drop ceilings is an everyday thing. It is quite easy when you can move a ceiling tile and get up inside the ceiling. Sometimes things are not that easy, and everything is sheetrocked over. What to do then.

Well the first thing you do is hope that the sheetrock ceiling is dropped so that you can not only go across from side to side, but also front to back. If the sheetrock is up on the beams then there will be a lot of work ahead cutting out all kinds of holes.

Luckily in this installation the sheetrock was not on the beams, but instead dropped down. The best situation for when there is no ceiling tiles to move out of the way. Holes still need to be made, but they can be done so at a minimum.

In the foreground of the image you can see a  square hole that had to be cut
so that I could fit my hand in and fish the wire to make a turn.
Several other smaller holes were made with a hole saw where wires needed to  run.

There is a crawl space above this ceiling, so all that was needed here
is the small hole saw hole below the exit sign (barely noticeable) 

This is the opposite wall from the image above, and just outside
the door where the square hole was made (2 photos above)
This brings the wire into this room, and over the ceiling in here.
The reason it could not be brought in above the ceiling in this room
is because the ceiling heights differ, AND this is a brick wall,
the wall by the "EXIT" sign is also a brick wall.

Another larger square hole had to be made to get around
ductwork inside the ceiling. 

To get from the 2nd floor to the 1st Floor a small
hole saw was used to get inside the walls. 

Unfortunately the first hole came right behind a beam, so a second
had to be made to get the wall up in the ceiling of the 2nd floor.

The wired up power supply. 

Most of the cameras installed. 

In cases like this, you want to keep the damage to a minimum. I advised the customer ahead of time that damage would need to be done to the walls so that the wires could be run. I advised them that it was not our responsibility to repair that damage. I used a hole saw for most of the holes to keep the openings consistent, so that it would be easier to repair. It was also faster to make openings in the wall with a drill and holesaw, rather than use a sheetrock saw and have inconstant sized holes. Some holes did need to be opened with a saw, but I believe there was only 2 or 3 that needed to be opened that much. 

The customers existing DVR was only an 8 channel. and the admin password was locked, so we could not gain access to make changes to that system. The initial thought was to replace it with a 16 channel DVR, but the customer wanted to keep costs to a minimal. So we installed another (cheaper) 8 channel DVR from the same manufacturer so that they could use the same software on their computer to view cameras from both DVRs at the same time. This did increase the cost of the DVR compared to what a budget DVR would have cost, but the benefit is that the customer can access all camera feeds from a single piece of software on their desktop with out needing to switch between windows.