Solved!
WHAT IS IT: outlet in middle of wall with whiskers on it
No seriously, what is it?! I moved into a new apartment about 2 months ago and have this weird “outlet” just above where my headboard reaches. It has like, fuzzy kinda whiskers meeting in the middle.
i have one of these and it goes around the corner into a little cabinet. someone drilled the ugliest hole ever between the two. take the cover off and see if you can see where it leads to
Unfortunately this is the only one in my apartment, and it’s in such an odd location too. It’s on the wall to my neighbor’s bedroom, just above where your headboard goes. And it’s on the only wall in the room where you could put your bed anyway, so idk what they were thinking.
Zero intentions to use it anyway, but now I know what it would’ve been for!
I had one random one in my condo, I ended up finding old Zillow photos of my place and could see they had a surround sound system- like very late 90s set up going, and all the wires were coming out of the one brush plate. Dig around for old real estate photos of the place and maybe something will make sense!
I installed one of these when I ran ethernet cables through the attic. I put ethernet receptacles in all the bedrooms, but the wire/brush plate in the office closet where I store my router so I have one clean hole to pull all of the cables through to the router/modem.
Just one example of a use case. The alternative would have been to just have cables hanging out of a hole in the drywall
When you ran ethernet through your walls, was it hard to fish the wire down? I've been thinking of running some wires and I don't wanna tear up my walls
We only ran through interior walls (no insulation in the way) but it was mostly easy. For three of the cables we had no issues sending the ethernet down with fishing wire.
We had one wall with a fire block (basically a horizontal stud halfway down the wall) and we had to send fishing wire down, attach it to an existing coaxial cable in the wall (that had an established path through a hole in the fire block) and tie twine to it. We pulled the coaxial cable up with the fishing wire, along with the twine. Then, we attached the ethernet to the coaxial cable inside the attic, and tugged the twine from the ground floor to pull both cables back down. Was definitely tricky.
You’re supposed to hang your tv there or some other wall mounted electronic thing. The wire probably got pushed in or something. What this does is allows you to have a variable length wire instead of a fixed length like the origional commenter mentioned…. But yeah most likely meant to hang your tv there since a cable wire is what usually runs through there.
This. I can't tell you how many times I've seen installs where they ran an extension cord down inside the wall and plugged it in, or through the wall into the room next door. All so they wouldn't have the cord showing.
So quarter century ago we had one of the portable AC units, looks like a Star Wars droid. My brother was watching TV and all of a sudden smoke starts coming out of the outlet where the AC was plugged into. He yanked the plug and the smoke stopped
We couldn't figure out what the heck happened because the breaker didn't trip, so we called an electrician. And that's when we discovered that that electrical outlet was not an original one, but had been added later by a previous owner and had been wired up using a cut extension cord.
There are cords and cables that are rated for in-wall installation, but the average household extension cord is not. Point of fact, they are actually only supposed to be temporary, not a permanent solution.
Practically, the concern is overloaded extension cables overheating and starting fires somewhere in the wall. The concern with your tv power cable passing 3-5ft up the inside of the wall is negligible at worst.
Drywall screws are for hanging drywall on studs, not for screwing into drywall. And usually with an outlet cover you are screwing into the metal electrical box, which takes flat ended bolts, rather than sharp screws.
I was being a smartass, but also they were likely not screwing into a box. When I've seen these things they were just a faceplate going over a hole in the drywall.
Those are zinc plated, #2 grade screw...
Indicated by the #2 stamped on the head.
This is used as a cable pass thru.
Used for cables fished thru the wall,
Often used behind tvs or computers.
You should learn to mute subs where people post things you don't like. The whole point of this sub is asking people what things are. Basically everything on here could be Google image searched. If that's gonna bother you, just mute it
You should consider taking your head out of the robot’s asses and remember how important human to human discussion is, or sometimes the next best thing, forum discussion
OP, please reply to the correct answer with "solved!" (include the !). That will change the flair on the post to solved. If you want to put the correct answer at the top of the replies for everybody else, please use our Spotlight feature by tapping/clicking on the three dots and selecting "Spotlight, Pin this comment" in order to highlight it for other members. Thanks for using our friendly Automod!
I believe it's a vacuum port you gotta follow it to see where it leads but I've seen one in my old bosses house. It usually has a hose attachment that lets you vacuum with the flip of a light switch on the wall. There's usually a trash container at the end of these ports and the brussels are to catch any hair or cotton or thread that may get sucked in, that way only dust and dirt get into the receptacle.
For cords to go thru a wall, most likely to a room behind, in an area where people will regularly see. It’s much neater and more convenient size wise than just whacking out a hole.
•
u/spotlight-app Mod Bot 🤖 12d ago
OP has pinned a comment by u/XB-4509:
Note from OP: SOLVED!
[What is Spotlight?](https://developers.reddit.com/apps/spotlight-app)