EIFS and a cable wire...

EIFS...  That's Exterior Insulation Finish System...  Or synthetic stucco....  That's what we have on the outside of our house down here in Arizona.. So, whats that got to do with anything...?

Back in the Midwest where cable wires are routinely attached to the lower outside of your home and then punched thru the wall to appear at that magical point right behind your TV it all seems simple....  And I was naive enough to think I was going to hang the wire in the same fashion here.

But EIFS is a layer of black sealing paper with styrofoam nailed over it..  Then a wire screen fastened over the whole thing and two layers of concrete like finish...  The house is essentially styrofoam with concrete on it...

If you bang into it with almost anything the foam will just mash or break...  The concrete is fairly firm until it cracks...but doesn't have much strength once broken...  Maybe about like the drywall on the inside..

The fellows at the lumber yard told me to use wall anchors like you would on the inside to hang a picture...  But, any place that the wall has a hole punched in it allows moisture to get behind the EIFS and then the wall rots.. That doesn't seem to be much of a problem here in the desert, until we get those monsoon rains of late summer...

So how was I going to hang this wire on the bottom outside of the stucco panel?  The more I learned, the more the whole thing looks to be a problem...  In homes I have built before, the contractor allowed me to install my own wiring before the walls were finished, but not here...  You are not supposed to go on the job site at all, unless accompanied with one of their people..

Besides I was in Kansas when all of this construction was taking place...

But from crawling on the ground I learned that the styrofoam had a metal flashing running around the bottom of the wall next to the concrete base slab..    Oh, the base slab is post tensioned concrete with wires running thru it under extreme pressure, so drilling that is taboo as well...  It could explode if drilled..

What I did today was to drill up into the flashing metal from underneath and put a 2 inch screw up into the substrate under the styrofoam with a little cable clamp around the wire...  I added a dab of construction adheasive to glue the thing together as well...

Trouble was that my drill didn't fit up under there so I was drilling at an angle and breaking drill bits off about two to each hole...  I finally decided to use a self tapping screw with the head cut off as a drill bit...  It never broke again..

I had to run this wire about 50 feet putting a screw and cable clamp about every three feet...  This took me a long long time..  I am old and getting down on the ground to drill all these is rather slow.. The project took most of the day....

Reader Rick Rousseau suggested the cable wall thru washers, and I had found them at the Home Depot and had a package..  And as well I had the old work cable box to put into the inside of the house...  I found the stud in the wall with a  electronic stud finder and measured and cut that hole with a drywall hand knife..

Then using a long masonry bit I drilled from the inside of the hole to the outside of the wall...  The hole was soo small outside that I had to search for quite a while to even find it..  It was lost in the swirls of finish coat masonry..

Eventually late in the afternoon, I had the cable mounted and caulked and the finish plate installed in the inside room...  It just looks like another plate on the wall....

So the project was finally done......  Surely the satellite installers have a better way of doing this job, but with back yards inside of concrete walls here I didn't want to go poking around in others properties to see how it was done......

I did know that mounting the dish on the side of the EIFS clad house was not going to be a good solution, so that was why I used a pipe in the ground in the first place...

Retired Rod