Mounting Advice · August 2026
HOW TO HIDE TV WIRES: FOUR OPTIONS, HONESTLY PRICED
A beautifully mounted TV with a bundle of cables hanging beneath it looks worse than no mount at all. Here's every real way to fix that, what each costs, and which one to avoid.
First: You Have Two Different Problems
Almost every confusing thing about hiding TV wires comes from treating the cables behind your TV as one job. They're two, and they follow completely different rules.
Signal cables — HDMI, ethernet, speaker wire — are low voltage. These can be run inside a wall freely, provided the cable carries an in-wall fire rating. Easy.
Power is a different animal. That's line voltage, and what may go inside a wall is governed by electrical code. This is where every shortcut, every bad forum suggestion, and every genuinely dangerous idea lives.
Keep those two apart in your head and the rest of this is simple. The four options below are really four different answers to the power question — the HDMI is coming along for the ride either way.
One rule that applies regardless: power and signal cables should not share the same hole or run bundled together inside the wall. Keep them separated.
The Four Options At A Glance
| Method | Look | Reversible | Our Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leave them visible | Cables on show | Yes | Included |
| Paintable raceway | Slim painted channel | Yes, cleanly | $35 |
| In-wall kit | Nothing visible | Patchable | $60 |
| Chicago-Style PowerBridge | Nothing visible, no plastic box below | Patchable | $80 + $80 fitting |
| Recessed outlet | Nothing visible, no box below | Permanent | $250 |
Those are our actual published add-on prices, not estimates. Now the detail on each.
Option 1: Paintable Raceway
A slim channel that mounts to the wall surface, swallows every cable including power, and gets painted the same colour as the wall.
People dismiss this one because it sounds like the cheap answer, and it is the cheap answer — but painted properly to match, it genuinely disappears from a few feet away. Up close you can see it. From the couch you can't.
What makes it the right call more often than people expect:
- No holes in the drywall. Nothing is cut, nothing is fished, nothing needs patching later.
- It handles power without any code question at all, because the cord stays outside the wall where it was designed to be.
- It comes off. For renters this is the whole ballgame — peel it, touch up the paint, done.
- It works on walls you can't fish. Brick, concrete, tile, or a wall packed with fire blocking — raceway doesn't care.
If you rent, start here. It's the only option on this list that asks nobody's permission.
Option 2: In-Wall Kit — The Mainstream Answer
This is what most people actually want: the TV on the wall, nothing visible beneath it, and no electrician involved.
A listed in-wall power extension kit is two recessed boxes — one behind the TV, one down low near your existing outlet — joined by cable that's rated to live inside a wall. You plug the TV into the top box, and a short lead from the bottom box plugs into your existing wall outlet. No new circuit, no wiring into the panel. Your HDMI runs through the same openings, kept separate from the power.
The key word is listed. These kits are tested and certified specifically for permanent in-wall use, which is exactly what makes them the legitimate version of the idea. It's not a technicality — the certification is the product.
Reversible enough: you're cutting two openings, so undoing it means two drywall patches. That's an afternoon, not a renovation.
Buy your HDMI 10 to 15 feet long — longer than you think you need. This is the single most common thing people get wrong, and it's the one that costs the most to fix.
The run isn't the gap you can see. It goes from behind the TV, down inside the wall, back out at the bottom, and across to your equipment — with slack needed at both ends to make the connections without straining anything. Extra length coils neatly behind the console and nobody ever sees it. A cable that's a foot short means opening the wall again. You can always shorten a long cable's slack. You can't stretch a short one.
Option 3: A Real Outlet Behind The TV
The cleanest result available, and the one worth paying for if the TV is staying put.
Instead of extending your existing outlet up the wall, an electrician installs a genuine recessed receptacle behind the television, fed properly from the existing circuit. The TV's own power cord plugs straight into it and vanishes behind the panel.
What you get over the kit in Option 2:
- Nothing at the bottom of the wall. No second box, no plate near the baseboard, no short cord looping into an outlet. Just a clean wall.
- A recessed box, so the plug sits inside the wall plane and the TV can hang flat — which matters a lot on a low-profile mount.
- It's permanent and it's proper. Real wiring, done to code, that stays with the house.
We charge $250 for this, and it costs more than the other options for an honest reason: it's electrical work, not cable management. Done right it looks like the wall was built for the TV, because functionally it now was.
The middle path: a Chicago-Style PowerBridge
Between the $60 kit and the $250 outlet there's an option we build ourselves, and it's the one we reach for most.
The listed kits sold in stores work fine, but they leave a chunky moulded plastic box sitting at the bottom of your wall — you solved the cable problem and gained an eyesore. Ours is built to look like a proper outlet behind the TV, without that box at the baseboard. Same idea, considerably better looking.
It's $80 for the PowerBridge and $80 to fit it. We price the two separately on purpose: plenty of people already own a PowerBridge, and if you do, you only pay the $80 fitting.
Option 4: The One To Avoid
Somewhere in every forum thread on this subject, someone suggests just drilling two holes and running an extension cord up through the wall. It's cheap, it's quick, and it appears to work perfectly.
Don't. This one's worth explaining rather than just asserting, because the reasoning is what makes it stick.
It's specifically prohibited. Electrical code doesn't leave this to interpretation — flexible cords may not be run through holes in walls, ceilings or floors, or used as a substitute for a building's permanent wiring. It's named in the text.
The reason is concealment itself. An extension cord is built for temporary, visible, portable use — situations where if it gets pinched, chafed or damaged, you see it. Sealing one inside a wall removes the assumption the whole design rests on. Permanent in-wall cable is jacketed differently, rated for continuous concealed use, and protected where it crosses framing.
And it fails slowly. Confined in a cavity with no airflow, a cord jacket dries and eventually cracks. That takes years, which is exactly why it looks like it works. The install that seems fine today is not evidence about year six.
There's an insurance dimension too. Non-compliant concealed wiring found after a fire is the kind of detail that complicates a claim, and it's discovered by inspection at sale far more often than people expect.
Option 2 exists precisely to solve this problem legitimately, and costs very little more.
The In-Wall HDMI Myth, Cleared Up
Two claims get made about in-wall rated HDMI cable. One is nonsense and one is real, and they're constantly mixed together by people selling cable.
The nonsense: that in-wall rated HDMI gives a better picture. It doesn't. An HDMI signal is digital — it either arrives or it doesn't. A CL2-rated cable and an identical unrated one carry exactly the same image. Anyone upselling you on in-wall cable for picture quality is selling you nothing.
The real part: the rating is about fire, not signal. It describes the jacket. Standard PVC cable jackets release hydrogen chloride gas when they burn, and a wall cavity is a channel that carries smoke and flame between floors. CL2 and CL3 jackets are tested to resist spreading flame, which is why code calls for rated cable on in-wall runs.
So: buy the rating, ignore the sales pitch. It costs a few dollars more and it does nothing whatsoever for your picture — which is exactly as it should be.
The Short Version
- Signal and power are two separate problems. HDMI can go in the wall; power has rules.
- Renting, or on brick, tile or concrete? Paintable raceway, $35, and it comes off cleanly.
- Want nothing visible without an electrician? Listed in-wall kit, $60. “Listed” is the whole point.
- Want that without the plastic box at the baseboard? Our Chicago-Style PowerBridge, $80 + $80 fitting — or just the $80 fitting if you own one already.
- Want it perfect? Recessed outlet behind the TV, $250, because it's real electrical work.
- Never run an extension cord through the wall. It's prohibited, it fails slowly, and it complicates claims.
- Buy HDMI at 10–15 ft. You can coil slack; you can't stretch short.
- In-wall rated HDMI does nothing for your picture. Buy it anyway — the rating is about the jacket burning.
Want The Wires Gone?
Cable strip $35, in-wall concealment $60, hidden outlet behind the TV $250 — on top of the $100 flat mount. Every price published, nothing invented on the day.
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