R E M O T E C O N T R O L A N Y W H E R E ! K I T
Exterior walls are different. They must insulate the house from the heat and cold outside, so they are stuffed with insulation. The national building code requires that the hollow wall space in exterior walls be broken by a horizontal stud placed between the vertical studs. This “fire blocking” makes it very difficult to retrofit long lengths of cable. In some areas of the country the exterior walls are constructed of solid masonry, and have no hollow space for cables.
Start by examining all the possible routes you might take to run the sensor cable from the sensor location to the A/V compo- nents to be controlled. Use a stud sensor or other device to locate the internal structure of the wall. You want to avoid all studs or joists. A typical route would be from the sensor loca- tion up the inside of the wall to a new hole drilled into the top “plate” (horizontal 2 x 4 at the top of the inside of the wall), into the attic crawl space, then down another plate to the wall behind the stereo system itself. The other very common route is through the bottom plate of the wall into an unfinished base- ment or crawl space.
Identify where all of your electrical, phone, and TV wiring is likely to be and plan to route around it all. You can accidental- ly induce interference on your sensor cable right beside electri- cal cable for more than a few feet. Try to keep sensor cable running parallel to power cables at least 3 feet away. To find exactly where an electrical cable is routed, try inspecting the inside of the wall by turning off the breaker for a particular power outlet or switch, removing the cover plate and switch or receptacle, and shining a penlight into the wall. If you have access to an attic or basement space, you can see which part of the wall space is free of obstructions (Figure 13).
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