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Cable management thru/around AV workstation?
Does anyone know of good, inexpensive solutions for attaching cords to the bottom of your workstations, and where to get them? I double as our company’s video and AV guy, and in that role I sit at an AV workstation where we have the camera switchers etc for running our events, in our conference room. At that workstation we have a mess of cords just sitting on the floor that I’m trying to figure out a way to attach to the bottom of the desk. It includes a spaghetti-like mess of HDMI cables, power cords and long heavy coils of Ethernet cables. I’m envisioning some kind of velcro bands that I could screw or somehow firmly attach to the bottom of the desk. But I’m open to ideas and would be grateful for any suggestions.
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17 Replies
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A quick Google search of “cable management” brought many useful links.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Cable+management&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
There are solutions from braided wraps to outright raceway, depending on your budget, and just as important, physical environment.
How often do you need to access the cabling? Are the workstations moveable? What sort of “service loop” do you need?
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Thanks very much Alan, and I’ll check out those google links. The workstation is fixed in place, and once they’re in place I won’t need to access the cables very often at all, extremely infrequently I’d say. My apologies, but what does “service loop” mean? I’m attempting to share two images of the workstation and cabling. Just let me know what you or others think, thanks again, or if you can’t see the images. (For background, this mess is a result of my company moving into a new office last year, when we had an AV installer install everything and attach these cables to the bottom of card tables in the AV room. Complicating things we didn’t get permanent furniture for the room till later, which required disconnecting all the cables. Now my employer prefers not to pay to have the AV installer come back to properly install the cables etc in the new furniture. So I’m trying to do the best, least expensive job myself that I can to manage these cables and get them off the floor.)
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My take would be a combination of screw eyes into the table, then big S-hook for each rolled up cable –
…stuff you can get at a hardware store.
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Thank you very much Thomas, this looks like exactly the type of products we need. Much appreciated. Just one more question on this for you or anyone else, and of course I’d be interested if anyone else has other recommendations on any of this too. In addition to the cords I also need to secure several little boxes to the underside of the desk too, an example of which I included in an attached photo. Any quick recommendations for securing something like this? It seems like the hook and screw approach would work for this too. But I just need something to wrap/tie the box in, and I was wondering if anything better than just standard cable ties (or maybe a couple of them) might work.
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Cable ties are slim enough to slip between the connected cables, and strong enough to last. Also easy to cut and replace when a unit has to be moved again or replaced.
Alternative I can think of is double-sided tape to stick to the the table’s underside. Removing later, however, may need a cutter to slice through.
Thomas Leong
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Ugh. I’ve worked in environments like that.
Thomas has good suggestions.
I have one more. You might want to put twin-check labels on cabling and connectors. If you have to break something out it’s helpful for putting it all back together.
And a service loop won’t help you that much, now that I see the room, as it’s mostly to let racked gear slide out for closer attention without disconnecting everything first. Your stuff doesn’t appear to be rackmounted.
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The power strips already have mounting holes for screws: you can screw them into the underside of the desk, or high on the wall just below the underside of the desk. Split tube wire and cable tubing will gather and hide the rest pretty well, you can also shoot mounting screws right thru the split tubing into the underside of the desk to hold the tubing.
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Thanks so much Alan, Thomas and Mark for the great suggestions. Mark, on one of your points, I’m not as familiar with split wire tubing. Is the link below what you’re talking about?
https://www.cabletiesandmore.com/black-wire-looms-40-2929?gclid=Cj0KEQjwoau9BRDMvsnv5MCh24UBEiQAKOqcfV8tdRbaVjpERHv1bvo_oVa8761_w5Zo6bbGM-Kgv08aAnqZ8P8HAQWould this be an alternative to the screw eyes and S-hook approach Thomas suggested, or just a complement to it?
Very much appreciated guys.
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Yes, the split loom is what I meant. Also, you need not in every case have to run the loom all the way point to point, to keep everything tidy. You could use shorter sections with gaps in between of a foot or two, and it still works. The full end to end run simply looks a little “cleaner”, but works functionally the same.
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To manage the wall warts and the little connector boxes, chain stores like Wall of China Mart and Target have a lot of neat little shelves of metal sheet and mesh, geared towards organizing kid’s school lockers or desk organizers in the Office supplies stores/sections. Really inexpensive. I use one as a holder for my electric razor at home, looks very tidy:-) You can find some little lightweight holders in many sizes that will nicely adapt to the task, and also screw right into the bottom of the desk. If using plastic, either pre-drill or melt the screw holes in the plastic before mounting, to prevent cracking the plastic.
You can also go Ikea, to really set off the FCPX suite:-)
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