Three Ways to Hide Your TV Cords

Beautifying and neatening your living or office space makes the places where you spend your days more pleasant to inhabit – and these three ways to hide your TV cords prevent the unsightly sprawl of cables that poorly planned TV setups create. Fortunately, there are several great solutions you can use to spruce up the appearance of your TV viewing area. 

Generally speaking, it’s easiest to hide TV cords if the television mount is located on the wall. Concealing TV cords that snake across the floor is a much harder task, and due to the structure of flooring, it’s often a monumental – or impossible – job to conceal the cables beneath the floor itself. You can sometimes use the methods here to hide the cords of a ceiling-mounted TV, too, but they are simplest with a wall mount.

TV Mounts with Built-In Cable Ducts

The most permanent solution, providing full protection to the wiring and keeping the cords isolated from contact with the building’s structure, is the installation of a built-in cable duct in the wall. This will require either installing the duct during construction, or cutting out part of the wall, installing the duct, and then patching the wall seamlessly to make the insertion invisible from the outside.

A typical cable duct is a squared-off tubular length of tough PVC plastic which can be cut to the appropriate length with a pair of specialized cutters. An opening is left in the wall directly below the TV wall mount into which the cables are fed; this opening may be partially closed with a sliding panel even when in use. The cables run along the duct to connect to the wiring elsewhere without appearing outside the wall.

A cable duct provides the most solid solution and helps keep the cables isolated from the wall interior. This reduces the already slight chance of mice or other rodents nibbling on the cords to practically zero, and ensures you know exactly where the cable is running for purposes of future wall modifications. It also offers near-total concealment of the cords, other than possibly a short length right below the TV wall mount.

The Flexible Polymer Rod Method

If you don’t want to tear out a narrow section of your wall to insert a full cable duct, you can still route the cables through the wall using a different method often called “fishing.” First, use a stud finder to determine where the studs, and any fire blocks connecting them, are located inside the wall. Pick a spot where you will not need to drill through many studs to create a direct path the attic or basement.

Cut an opening for the electric box where the cables or plug emerges, directly behind the spot chosen for the TV wall mount so that the screen hides it once attached. Drill a hole in the floor or ceiling, large enough to thread the cables through to an outlet or other connection in the cellar or attic. If there is a fire block between the studs (a horizontal section of wood), insert a flexible drill bit and drill a hole through.

Once you have a complete passage arranged, you can “fish” the cable through using flexible polymer rods with a hook at the end, taped to the cable. Once the cable is ready to be plugged in or attached, you can install the chosen electric box in the hole cut for it, attach the TV wall mount over it, and enjoy your viewing without a mess of cables.

External Cable Covers or Conduits

The fastest method of hiding your TV cords from your wall-mounted TV is lengths of cable covers or conduits which attach directly to the wall surface. These may be squared off or rounded (rather like a pipe cut in half lengthwise) and are usually supplied with some kind of adhesive tape for attachment. This creates a covered channel on wall’s surface, so no cutting or drilling is required. It’s easy to reverse the installation later, peeling the conduits off and deleting any remaining tape with an adhesive remover.

External cable covers, of course, are not complete concealment – they leave a visible object extending down the wall, just one much neater looking than crooked, dangling TV cords. You can lessen their visibility by painting them or even attaching matching wallpaper to their surface, camouflaging them against the wall’s background.

All of these methods make a wall-mounted TV set much more attractive and finished-looking, putting the long, trailing wires partly or totally out of sight. You can find lots of top quality, high capacity TV wall mounts at Onkron.us to complete your viewing setup. You can pick from a number of different designs as well as various sizes for mounting screens up to 100” – shop our quality TV mounts to get your project launched.