WiFi stops at the back door. Ethernet to the garden office Across Nottingham

The job

Three ways across a garden

I run Cat6 from your router to a socket inside the outbuilding. How it gets there depends on the garden.

• Overhead. Quickest to fit where the line of sight is clear. An anchor plate on the house, another on the office, and the cable strapped to a catenary wire, a tensioned steel line between the two, so the cable never carries its own weight. The waney-edge office at the top of this page is one.
• Buried. Conduit in a shallow trench under grass or gravel. Nothing to see once the turf’s back down.
• Along the boundary. Clipped to a wall or fence rail, under the coping, over the gate if there’s one. One customer needed wiring from the front of the house to the very rear. The tidiest route was over his rear gate, so I built a small section for the cable to cross on. He put it in his review.

Whichever way it goes, the house wall gets a drip loop, a dip in the cable just before it enters so rain drips off the bottom instead of following the cable in, then a sealed grommet.

What’s in the office end

A white ethernet faceplate, or a double if you’ve a printer and a PC. The cable comes in low, clipped along the cladding, through one small hole with a grommet, and up to the socket. Most offices are already built and decorated, and nothing inside needs taking apart. The before and after on this page is a grey timber cabin: cable out of the base, then clipped low along it into a grommet.

For WiFi inside the office, a small access point plugs into the new socket and gives it a signal of its own. One garden bar has a TV on a shelf, an ethernet socket on the same wall and an outdoor plug below it. Consoles and Smart TVs in a garden room are covered on hardwire gaming and TV.

Not built yet

If the pod isn’t up yet, get the electrician in first. It needs its own power, and I do the data side, not the electrics. Tell me the build dates and I can run the cable alongside their first fix so it goes in the same trench in its own duct. See first fix for extensions and new builds.

What to send me

A photo from the house looking at the office, one from the office looking back, and a rough idea of the distance. That’s usually enough to quote from. If the router is in an odd spot, photograph that too, because sometimes the job starts with an ethernet socket in the right room.

Two NHS workers had me out at short notice to fit an external ethernet cable to their garden pod. Their laptops then had trouble connecting, so I popped back an hour later to check everything had got sorted. Lorraine had me round to quote one day and fit two sockets the next, one downstairs for gaming and one in her outside office. Both are on the reviews page as written.

What it costs

No price list, because the cost depends on how far the cable goes, whether it’s overhead, buried or along a wall, and how many sockets you want at the office end. Send the photos and the distance and I’ll come back with a figure, or arrange to look. Travel is in the quote, not added afterwards. How pricing works explains the rest.