Wire pull advice, please... (pics)

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aristobrat

IPCT Contributor
Dec 5, 2016
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So I thought I understood how soffit worked... not so much. o_O

Now I've got an overview camera mounted in a location where I can't connect it to Ethernet without some work (which I'm not opposed to doing, I just don't want to make things needlessly worse).

Before I jack this up anymore, wanted to post a picture of the situation and see if anyone had any ideas that I'm missing...

Below, you can hopefully see the picture of where the camera is mounted. I thought the soffit around the light would easily pop-up, and I could get my hand in there to connect the camera to Ethernet. Turns out that soffit is tight as a drum.

Popping the light down just gives me access to an electrical box. No way to get my hand in that way.

If I try to approach this from inside the house (which is the bottom picture), the camera pig tail is to the left of that rafter.

Any thoughts? My two so far are to pull the fascia back and try to unscrew the soffit (not sure how hard that is, but I imagine the fascia's going to look crappy when I try to bend it back to original), or drill through the rafter a hole big enough to get my hand through (which structurally seems like a bad idea).


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I would drill through the rafter and feed the network cable into the enclosed area there the camera is mounted. Use coat hanger or glow rod to fish it out.
 
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Just drill a small hole (1/4-3/8") about where I made a red circle:
Don't go crazy, you don't know exactly where the electrical wire runs. In theory it should be stapled within 12" of the light's box, you don't wan't to drill through that wire.
EDIT: moved the circle I drew to reduce odds of hitting wire
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push some wire, a fish stick, pull string with some loop knots, or small chain through the hole. Hook onto it from the hole you made behind your camera. Feed an uncrimped cat-6 cable and you're in business.

Sometimes there is additional blocking in these areas that can make it more fun. If it comes to it you can get a cheap boroscope cam from aliexpress or fleabay
 
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Will give that a shot.

The hole behind the camera is 3/4" and goes through about 3" of wood, so that'll def. put the fun into the fishing part!
 
Use it with one of the VR headsets that hold a phone in front of your eyes and it would be hands free. Might fall off the ladder though. =)
 
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Ended up using a bit of everyones advice.

I removed the camera, got a chain bead from Home Depot, made a loop out of it, attached some pull string to the end of it, loosely Scotch taped it to a 1/2" dowel, and slid that all into the spot where the camera wire fed through.

From the ROG, I drilled a hole through the rafter and then fished the bead chain through. Ended up dropping it once, but my phone camera was able to see through that hole, so I was able to find it and re-fish it again.

A project like this would normally take me most of a Saturday to pull off, but it somehow came together tonight in about an hour. Still have some fine tuning of the camera position to do, but that can wait until it's above freezing (and no more 30 MPH wind gusts).

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the advice!!!

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