data-wiringdrywallstudswiring
How can one pass (speaker) cables through walls from the floor to the ceiling.
I am assuming that drilling a small hole at the top, dropping the cable I want to pass through and catching it at the bottom will not work because the wire being dropped would encounter a cross-beam?
Are there techniques to accomplish this? I am in California, so I basically have a house made of cardboard (no bricks) but what I assume is drywall.
Any tips are appreciated
A horizontal board between two studs is typically fire blocking. The idea of fire blocking is to prevent a cavity in a wall more than 8' high where fire can quickly spread. You'll see this in any room with over 8' ceilings. For it to work properly, you can't have any gaps allowing air to go from the lower cavity to the upper one. This means any gaps need to be caulked with fire rated caulk (that's typically the red or orange caulk). Why the heck someone installed this blocking and electrical box in the same place is bizarre, either one could have been moved up or down a few inches.
To work around this, you have a few options. You can cut a gap into it, and fit your old work box, but from the small opening you'll have a very difficult time cutting out the back. The result will require a load of caulk on the 2x4 that you squeeze the old work box into. And you'll need to install it a few inches to the side so there is some material continuous from side to side.
You could also fix this the right way and open the wall up, and reinstall new blocking a few inches up or down. Then you can remove the old blocking and install a new work box.
And the easiest solution is as DA01 says, install the new switch a few inches higher so it's above the blocking. I'd probably go with this solution myself, unless you feel like doing some drywall repair.
Concrete walls typically have conduits where all wiring passes (edit: as pointed out by @alx9r, this might not always be the case. Sometimes wiring is cast directly into the concrete). This allows you to add additional wires to the same conduits, but doesn't help if you need to pass a wire between two places that don't have a conduit already in the wall.
Whether or not you can use the existing conduits is both a matter of convenience (are there existing conduits from and to the place you want to run the Ethernet cabling) and of wiring code - is it allowed to run Ethernet (low voltage) cabling along side other cables - high voltage (110/220 V), phone lines, TV coaxial cables, etc.
If there are no existing conduits you can use, you'd need to consider several options (all pictures from Google Images):
Run the cable along the walls, often by the skirting boards. The cable can be attached with clips to the wall. This method is easiest, cheapest and fastest, but people often don't like cables running visibly around the house and if the cables aren't properly secured they might be a tripping hazard.
Run the cables in plastic channels that are attached to the walls. This is similar to number 1, only that the channels help hold the cable better and are probably more aesthetic.
Run new conduits in the wall. This is done by carving a channel in the wall (called "wall chasing"), placing a plastic conduit in the channel, mortaring the conduit in place and patching up the channel on top of the conduit. As can be imagined, this is hard work (especially for long distances), very dirty (especially if grinding disc cutters are used to score the channel) and must be done carefully to avoid hitting other cables and pipes already in the wall. However, this will give the best aesthetic result.
If a conduit is used, fishing the new cable through the conduit is done either using preexisting cables in the conduit or with a fish tape. The new cable is attached to the preexisting cable or the fist tape (after pushing the fish tape through the conduit to the other side) and then pulled until the new cable is fully in the conduit. From my experience, if you have cables already in the conduit, it is much easier to pull them completely out and then fish the entire bundle (old cable/cables together with new Ethernet cable) back into the conduit.
Finally, Cat6 doesn't give that much of a difference in the common house over Cat5e - the extra shielding is useful with lots of cables running close together and for long distances. For home use spans are usually much shorter than the maximum 100 meters defined for Ethernet and there are only a few cables running side by side. However, Cat6 is much stiffer than Cat5e, making it quite challenging to fish it through conduits.
Best Answer
There are a variety of methods of fishing wires through walls. The most crude being brute force with some cable types. Coax can often easily be pushed down walls.
The most common way to fish cable is a fish tape:
(source: homedepot.com)
This is a flexible steel or fiberglass line that is wound up. You extract it by holding the reel and pushing the handle. To wrap it back up, you do the opposite motion.
In some cases (most often in drop ceilings) you can use rods to pass the cable around:
(source: homedepot.com)
If it is a short distance, the cheapest and easiest thing to use is a metal coat hanger.
With all methods, you feed it from one area to another and then pull the wire back out. It doesn't usually matter what direction you go, but you will find that with some routes, approaching it from one direction is easier than the other. If the route doesn't match up with how you are feeding the wire (ie: it is coming from one side, but for whatever reason you need to fish from the other), you can pull a temporary line (nylon string) through with the fish tape, and then pull the wire back through with the temporary line.
Plan your routes well using a stud finder and other visual hints. If you are lucky you will only need two holes. In some tough scenarios you might need to cut another hole to allow you to pull the wire through.
A flexible drill bit can also be useful:
(source: homedepot.com)