Slitting walls, features of the process, its types, rules and order of implementation, tools used and technology features. Slitting is the manufacture of technological cavities designed for laying hidden communications and transferring power distribution devices to a new location. In most cases, when chipping walls, the work is accompanied by noise and construction dust arising from the use of cutting tools. In conjunction with drawing up a plan of the necessary furrows and searching for previously laid electrical wiring in the walls, the process takes several hours, but does not require special professional training. Therefore, such work can be done independently.
Features of the process of chipping walls
In principle, it is impossible to do this work incorrectly, unless the grooves are too large. Then, for their subsequent embedding, a larger amount of mortar and time will be required. Nevertheless, there are rules that make the chasing process simple, and most importantly, safe.
The first thing you need to pay attention to is safety measures when working with a cutting tool. In addition to the large amount of dust generated during the process of cutting grooves in the wall, large fragments can fly out from under the abrasive wheels, which can cause injury. Therefore, you should work in goggles, gloves, overalls, and protect the respiratory system with a gauze bandage or respirator.
It is also worth considering the presence of existing hidden communications in the floor and walls. Damage to them during the chasing process can cause unpredictable consequences in the form of flooding or electric shock. Before starting work, the room must be de-energized, and the water supply in it must be temporarily turned off.
Before you start marking the walls for chasing, you must familiarize yourself with the requirements of building codes and regulations, the main of which are:
- It is possible to carry out strobes only in the vertical and horizontal directions. It is prohibited to arrange them at an arbitrary angle.
- The distance of horizontal grooves from floor slabs should not exceed 150 mm. The location of vertical strobes is allowed at a distance of at least 100 mm from door, window openings and corners of the room, as well as at a distance of at least 400 mm from the gas supply pipes.
- The groove route from the junction box to the switch or socket must have a minimum number of turns.
- Horizontal slitting of interpanel seams and supporting structures is prohibited.
These rules are taken into account when planning work. The wall chamfering scheme should display the cable layout plan, the electrical fittings installation locations, the wire cross-section and the diameters of the water supply pipes. The last two parameters affect the dimensions of the channel cross-section.
The main types of wall chipping
There are two types of utilities, which are hidden with the help of wall chipping, laying in channels. These are electrical wiring and pipes for heating or water supply. The grooves for them differ in size and manufacturing technology.
Shtroblenie walls for electrical wiring
The main thing when laying cables in prepared furrows is the preliminary drawing up of a diagram of future communications with the prospect of its long-term storage, for example, among documents for an apartment or house. The layout should clearly indicate the location of the channels, as well as their binding to the ceiling, floor or wall corner, indicating the exact dimensions.
A plan for slitting walls for wiring must be drawn up on paper, and then transferred to the walls. It is recommended to use a ruler and pencil for this. All channels should be perpendicular or parallel to the floor.
Parallel grooves are usually made near its surface or under the ceiling. This arrangement allows you to carry out gating with maximum safety without fear of bumping into old wiring. The perpendicular furrows are directed to the location of energy consumers: outlets, switches or other electrical equipment.
The width and depth of the groove for wiring depends on the thickness of the cable branch, but on average does not exceed 25 mm. After installing the electrical wiring in its place, the channels are sealed flush with the wall with mortar or gypsum mixture.
Chipping walls for pipes
Channels in the walls for pipes of heating and water supply systems are often made in load-bearing enclosing structures, which leads to a certain degree of risk. To minimize it, you should remember some rules:
- In order to avoid breaking the solidity of the bearing walls, they must not be cut by more than 1/3 of the thickness. In concrete walls, the depth of the groove should not exceed the thickness of the protective layer of the panel covering its reinforcing cage. For this reason, it is much more convenient to slit walls for pipes on brick or foam concrete structures, in which the depth of the channels is not regulated by the level of reinforcement due to its absence.
- After laying the pipelines in the cut-out grooves, they should be carefully repaired, excluding the formation of voids, which negatively affect the bearing capacity of the walls. For this purpose, a cement-sand mortar is used.
Wall chipping tools
For the manufacture of channels in the walls for hidden communications, several tools can be used, which in all cases are indispensable:
- Wall chaser … This is an expensive tool, most often it is possessed by craftsmen, whose professional activity is directly related to large volumes of work on laying hidden electrical wiring or water supply systems. The wall chaser greatly speeds up and facilitates work with durable wall materials: brick, concrete, stone and the like. Its device is no different in complexity. The tool can be compared to a circular hand saw or angle grinder "angle grinder", each of which has one cutting disc, and in the wall chaser there are two. Depending on the relative position of these discs, the tool can have a different principle of operation. With a parallel arrangement of the cutting parts, the chaser simultaneously cuts a pair of grooves, between which then, with the help of a perforator, excess material is selected, forming a cavity in the form of a channel. When the disks are inclined to each other, the tool immediately selects a triangular section groove. The parallel installation of the cutting edges of the fixture allows you to create wide and deep channels into which pipes with a diameter of up to 50 mm can be placed. It is convenient to make grooves for wiring with a tool with sloped edges. An industrial vacuum cleaner can be connected to the wall chaser, thanks to which all construction dust will be immediately removed without hanging in the air.
- Bulgarian … With this tool, you can cut a deep groove, but this work, in contrast to using a groove cutter, will take more time. Here, instead of a double single cut, you will have to perform two single cuts. In addition, working with a grinder is a rather dusty process.
- Perforator … It allows you to make grooves in any wall materials - brickwork, plaster, foam concrete, etc. The work of the punch does not cause a large amount of dust. Most often, this tool is used in conjunction with a grinder and a wall chaser to remove excess material between the slots and form the channel of the groove.
If you need to make cavities in small quantities and in soft materials such as plaster or plaster, you can use an ordinary chisel and hammer as a tool for chipping walls, which are probably available from any owner.
Preparatory work before chipping the walls
After studying the requirements of SNiP and drawing up a scheme for laying channels for hidden communications, you need to check the walls for the presence of old electrical wiring. This is a necessary measure, since hitting and drilling walls without knowing its location is extremely dangerous to health, and maybe life.
Old wiring can be detected using a special detector. It determines the depth of the wire, its location and current strength. This device is expensive, so it is rather expensive to buy it for rare use. But you can use an indicator screwdriver. It can also find old wiring hidden in the wall, albeit with a less accurate result.
It will not be reliable when the wire is located at a depth of more than 1.5 cm from the wall surface or if the power cable is laid in double insulation. In addition, the indicator does not respond to a low-current network. The results of this check must be displayed on the gating diagram and, if necessary, make appropriate changes to it.
At the final stage of preparation for work, markings are applied to the walls according to the plan developed on paper, after its completion, you can proceed to the main process.
DIY wall chipping technology
Excavations for hidden communications are made in the walls, which can be erected from any suitable building material. It can be drywall, wood, brick, stone and even reinforced concrete. Working with a wooden or plasterboard surface does not cause any particular difficulties. The cavities in them can be made with any hand-held cutting tool. To create channels for communications in concrete or brick, you will need special equipment and certain skills to work with it, and the slitting of load-bearing walls is completely allowed only by decision of the technical supervision authorities.
Slitting concrete walls
When making cuts in concrete walls, it is recommended to use the hammer drill immediately as the main tool. This is due to the fact that a chasing cutter, for example, is not able to remove most of the hard material between the made slots, and the remnants of it will have to be cleaned with a perforator. The same applies to the use of the "grinder" for this purpose.
The rock drill is a powerful machine designed and built for tough surfaces. The process is accompanied by a high level of noise, which can spread through the ceilings over several floors of the building. Therefore, in multi-storey buildings, it is recommended to perform this procedure only in the daytime, excluding weekends from the working schedule. Otherwise, complaints from neighbors to all instances will be provided.
To make a groove, the perforator must be equipped with two interchangeable devices - a shovel and a drill with a victorious soldering. After marking the future canals along its entire length, the drill makes holes of the required depth with a step of 10-15 cm. The punch regulator switches to the "drilling with impact" mode.
When the holes are ready, it is necessary to replace the drill clamped in the tool holder with a blade. In the process of further work, concrete bridges are removed between the holes, and a groove is formed on the marking line with a depth set during drilling. The punch switch at this time should be set to the "impact" position.
The edges of the furrow made with a punch blade will not differ in accuracy. But this will have to be sacrificed, or the tool will have to be used in conjunction with a "grinder" equipped with a diamond-coated cutting edge with a circle, although there will be much more dust with such a slitting of a concrete wall.
Slitting brick walls
It is recommended to perform it at the initial stage of the repair of the premises, that is, before the finishing of the ceiling, walls and floor. The reason for this is the appearance in the process of work of a large amount of red or caustic white dust that occurs when cutting clay or silicate bricks with a "grinder".
Walls built with these materials are highly susceptible to the impact of modern cutting power tools. To avoid a lot of noise and dust in the room, instead of a grinder, it is better to use a wall chaser connected to an industrial vacuum cleaner.
The laying of channels in the wall with this device is efficient and very fast, various chips of the edges of the groove and the occurrence of cracks in the structure are completely excluded, as sometimes happens when using a perforator.
In order to perform chipping of a brick wall according to the existing markings, you first need to determine and set the desired distance between the two cutting discs of the channeler. Then it is required to set the required depth of cut of the channels, which is fixed by adjusting the tool casing. After that, you need to fix the pipe of an industrial vacuum cleaner on a special branch of the chasing cutter, install the cutting device on the marking line and start work.
Once the slots are complete, the excess material in between can be easily removed with a chisel and hammer. With sufficient wall thickness, a hammer drill is often used to speed up this process. The work of his blade in the furrow easily breaks down the malleable brick.
Slitting panel walls
The device of channels for hidden communications in the walls of panel houses has its own characteristics. The grooves must not be made in ceilings and floors, as well as at the joints of panels in order to avoid destruction of the seams between them.
When cutting channels horizontally, do not cut the slab reinforcement. At best, such a violation could result in a fine, and at worst, it would deform the panel. In any case, the strobe should not be deeper than the level of the reinforcement. Otherwise, the exposure of metal rods sooner or later causes their corrosion, which leads to weakening of the structural elements of the house.
If it is impossible, but really want to do the slitting of the panel walls, you can decorate them with plasterboard sheets or plaster, and then hide the wiring in the thickness of the facing material. However, these methods will inevitably lead to an increase in the cost of work. The location of the reinforcement in the concrete panel is determined by a metal detector.
Wall slitting for switchgear
The recesses in the walls for sockets, switches and power distributors are made using a hammer drill equipped with special attachments. They are round crowns with a victorious soldering on their working edge.
In addition, grooves can be made using a grinder. In this case, rectangular cuts are made with a diamond wheel around the perimeter of the planned cut, and the material is removed from its middle using a perforator. In this way, cavities are made for distribution boards.
For switches and sockets, wall chasing is performed as follows:
- A hole with a diameter of 8 mm is drilled in the wall in the center of the marked circle.
- A small cut is made with a crown, indicating the contour of the planned hole.
- Around the circumference of the contour, a dozen thin holes are drilled.
- The weakened area is cut out with a crown to the end.
Before cutting out cavities for switchgears in concrete walls, it is necessary to select areas where there are no reinforcement, since its damage is highly undesirable, and sometimes even prohibited. How to gouge walls - watch the video:
[media = https://www.youtube.com/watch? v = kvcOhA5bgNM] The main issue of chipping walls is always safety, which must be carefully followed. Healthy hands will do the rest. Good luck!
