Suggestions to finish off low voltage ables coming through ceiling (1 Viewer)

[Plokij]

Hi everyone,
I just finished running all of my low voltage wiring to a wall mounted enclosure in a closet in my house. I would have liked to install the enclosure recessed into the wall, but the stud spacing was too tight.
Anyway, long story short, I now have about 50 wires coming through an unfinished ceiling where there's a rectangular slot formed by the wood. This rectangular slot is about 2ft long and about 6 inches wide.
Since the cables are not in the wall, I was looking for suggestions on how I should close up this slot for insulation purposes while still giving me access to reorganize the cables if I need to.
One approach I thought of doing was to basically cover the slot with a flexible foam, cut x's into the foam, then run the wires through the x's. Does any one else have any good ideas or tricks they can offer? Thanks!

 

[Adam Gregorich]

Originally Posted by Plokij /t/322748/suggestions-to-finish-off-low-voltage-ables-coming-through-ceiling#post_3957074
Hi everyone,
I just finished running all of my low voltage wiring to a wall mounted enclosure in a closet in my house. I would have liked to install the enclosure recessed into the wall, but the stud spacing was too tight.
Anyway, long story short, I now have about 50 wires coming through an unfinished ceiling where there's a rectangular slot formed by the wood. This rectangular slot is about 2ft long and about 6 inches wide.
Since the cables are not in the wall, I was looking for suggestions on how I should close up this slot for insulation purposes while still giving me access to reorganize the cables if I need to.
One approach I thought of doing was to basically cover the slot with a flexible foam, cut x's into the foam, then run the wires through the x's. Does any one else have any good ideas or tricks they can offer? Thanks!

I had some similar situations and approached it differently, so there are lots of things you can do. Depending on the amount of wiring you have the overall scale may be bigger, but the concepts are the same (and pretty inexpensive).

Here is a bundle of low voltage wiring coming into where our panel will be during construction:

Like you our panels were going to be mounted on the wall. We brought our wiring down the wall, cut out large holes in the Sheetrock (see right side of picture) then put up plywood to use as our mounting surface for the panels, cutting multiple 4 inch holes in the drywall to pull the cable through. We "presorted" the cable in the wall to get all the coax, cat5, speaker, etc cable together so like cables would be in the same location:

Finally we mounted all our "enclosures" on the wall and wired everything up. To make it look a bit more finished we used short 6" pieces of 4" conduit with flanges glued on (you can sort of see these through the cable tray). Please note that this was a "in process" picture. It looks a lot cleaner today:

If that doesn't work, I would recommend that you still mount a piece of plywood to the wall to mount your enclosure(s). If you need the cables to come out from the ceiling use as many double gang trim rings, sort your cable so cat5, coax, etc are all in the same trim ring. Once the Sheetrock is on use a trim plate from Midlite--they even make split plates you can install around your wiring so you don't have to feed your wiring through if you have already punched it down:


http://www.amazon.com/Midlite-2Gwh-Gr2-Double-Wireport-Grommet/dp/B001TCBGHO/http://www.amazon.com/Midlite-2Gswh-Double-Splitport-White/dp/B001P4EV78/


Both are available from Amazon and are available in multiple colors and sizes. Click on the pics to be taken to the product on Amazon. Here is a pic where I used these to trim wires coming out of the ceiling. It looks really clean:

 

[Plokij]

Hi Adam. Thanks for the response!
First and foremost, you did a really great job of managing your low voltage cables! I got a lot of ideas out of your post and need to work it into my plan.
I was originally going to leave the ceiling exposed in the closet where the wires came down, but since my original post, the drywall guys came and sealed it up and cut a hole for the 40 or so low voltage wires. Rather than undo their work, I think I'm going to put a cable tray up near the ceiling and organize the cables coming down from there.
Thanks again!

 

[Adam Gregorich]

No problem, thanks. Do me a favor and post some before, during and after pics. It's actually a good thing they covered it up. It might not have passed inspection otherwise as its a firebreak.