Wall Mounted TV Cable Management: What Goes Behind the Screen
A wall mounted television either looks clean or it doesn't, and the difference is usually decided months before anyone buys the television.
If your walls are still open, hiding the cables is straightforward and the materials cost very little. Once the plaster is on, the same result means opening the wall again or accepting a trunking box running down it. So the short answer is to put more into the wall than you think you need, while it is still cheap to do.
Here is what that means in practice.
Decide it before the wall is closed
The moment that matters is the week before plastering.
You do not need to have chosen the television yet. You do need to have decided roughly where it goes, and where the streaming boxes, the games console and all the wiring are going to live.
What to put in
For a normal living room television:
| What | How many | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Power behind the screen | one double socket | the TV, plus a soundbar or streaming box |
| Network points behind the screen | three | one for the TV, two spare |
| Empty conduit, screen to equipment | 50mm | so cables can be pulled through later |
The conduit is the one people leave out and the one that matters most. It is an empty flexible pipe inside the wall with a length of string left in it. When you want to run something new to the television in five years, you tie it to the string and pull it through. Without it, you are opening the wall.
Ask for 50mm. That is our minimum, because an HDMI plug is bigger than people expect and two of them will not fit through anything smaller.
Why three network cables, and why they all go to one place
One is for the television. One is for whatever box sits beside it. The third gets used for something nobody has thought of yet, and it always does.
The part that matters more than the number is where they end up. All three should run without interruption back to a single spot in the house, usually a utility room or a cupboard under the stairs, where the broadband router and the rest of the network equipment live. That is the same central point the rest of the house should come back to, which is the subject of our guide on how to wire your home for WiFi.
The cable costs a few euro. Running it afterwards costs a wall.
The mistake that holds your TV off the wall
Ask for recessed sockets behind the screen rather than standard ones.
A normal socket sits flush with the wall, so the plug sticks out around 40mm. The television then has to sit at least that far off the wall, whatever the bracket promises. A recessed socket sets the plug inside the wall line and the screen sits where it should.
On slim televisions this is not a refinement. It is the difference between it fitting properly and not.
Where exactly the outlets go depends on your television
There is no universal measurement here, and anyone who offers you one has not looked at enough televisions.
Some screens are thin across the top with the electronics in a thicker section low down, which leaves generous room behind the upper half. Others are slim the whole way down and sit very close to the wall, so there is barely any room anywhere behind them. A plug in the wrong place on one of those is exactly what stops the screen sitting flat.
The bracket matters too. Its arms are solid, and nothing can share that space.
If the television is already chosen, the positions can be worked out exactly from the manufacturer's dimensions and the bracket. That is what a setting out drawing is for. It names one specific screen and one specific bracket, because the measurements only hold for those two things.
If it is not chosen yet, which is normal at this stage, ask for the boxes to be set wide of the centre and low, because brackets often occupy the top part of the screen, particularly on smaller televisions. Leave enough slack in the cable to move the faceplate once the television arrives.
HDMI: only gamers need to think about this
For streaming, Sky and 4K Blu-ray, any decent HDMI cable will do. That is HDMI 2.0, and it carries 4K at 60 frames a second, which is what those sources produce.
Gaming is the exception. A PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X running 4K at 120 frames needs about three times the bandwidth. That is HDMI 2.1, and the cable has to be labelled Ultra High Speed. Ignore any version number printed on the box, because cables are not sold by version and that label is the only one that means anything.
The part worth knowing before the wall closes is this. A long cable that carries the ordinary signal perfectly well will not carry the gaming one. Ordinary copper is only dependable to about three metres at full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. So if there is a console in your future and the equipment is going into a cupboard elsewhere in the house, that run needs to be a fibre optic HDMI, and it needs to go in now.
There is a simpler answer if you can live with it. Keep the console in the room on a shelf under the television. Then the cable is two metres long and none of this applies.
How high to put it
| Where | Height from the finished floor to the centre of the screen |
|---|---|
| Living room, normal sofa | 1200mm |
| Kitchen or island seating | 1500mm |
The rule is that the middle of the screen sits close to eye level when you are sitting down, which is lower than most people instinctively mount it. It follows from how big the screen is, so if that is not settled yet, work out what size TV you need before anyone marks the wall.
Over a fireplace is the common exception, and it is always a compromise. It settles the furniture layout, and it puts the screen well above your eyeline. A tilting bracket recovers part of the angle and needs its own space allowed for behind it.
If you are recessing it into the wall
Setting the screen into a recess is the tidiest result and the least forgiving, because the hole gets built before the television is in the room.
Leave a 50mm gap all round the screen. That gives room for the bracket, room to get a hand in at the edge, and air around a panel that would otherwise sit in a sealed box. For depth, measure the actual television and the actual bracket rather than working from a round number. A 65 inch screen at 72mm deep needs a recess just over 100mm.
If there is a fire below it, get the fire specification first, because its clearances decide everything above it. And leave an access panel somewhere. A recess with no way into it is one that gets opened with a saw eventually.
This is the same detailing that goes into our cinema rooms, where the screen, the speakers and the seating are all set out together before anything is built.
If the wall is already finished
Not lost, just dearer.
On a stud wall with a hollow void, the cables can usually be dropped down inside between two small plates, one behind the television and one near the skirting. Two neat holes and no mess.
On a solid wall it means cutting a channel, then plastering and painting. Correct and permanent, and a bigger job.
Everything else is trunking on the surface. It works, and it looks like what it is.
The list to give your electrician
Print this and hand it over before first fix.
- 1 x twin socket, recessed, behind the screen
- 1 x four-gang data plate, three Cat6 outlets fitted
- Power and data on the same side, one plate above the other, not a shared plate
- Plates set low on the screen, clear of the bracket arms
- All three Cat6 home run to a single central location and terminated on a patch panel
- 2 x double socket at the equipment position
- Back boxes 47mm minimum
- 50mm conduit from screen position to equipment position, pull string left in
- Active optical HDMI pulled at first fix if equipment is remote and 4K120 gaming is in scope
- Screen centre marked at 1200mm FFL for a living room
- Timber grounds at bracket height in stud walls, so the bracket fixes into solid timber and not plasterboard
- Recess, if any, sized at screen plus 50mm all round and depth at screen plus bracket plus clearance
- Final plate positions set out from the actual screen and bracket once selected
Getting it planned properly
None of this is expensive. It is a few hundred euro of materials put in at the right moment instead of a few thousand spent undoing a wall later.
The difficulty is that most of it depends on decisions nobody has made yet when the electrician is on site. Which television, which bracket, where the equipment goes, whether anyone in the house games. Guessing is free. Guessing wrong is not.
If your house is at that stage now, it is worth having the television, network and audio provision planned in one go rather than room by room. We design it as a single system and give your electrician a dimensioned drawing to work from. Book a design call and we will go through the plans with you.