What to know about wall types, cable management and getting the height right — the details that separate a safe, professional-looking mount from a crooked TV and a tangle of cables.
A wall-mounted TV looks clean, frees up space and gives you the best viewing angle — when it's done right. Done wrong, it's a heavy, expensive screen hanging off inadequate fixings, sat at a neck-craning height, trailing a mess of visible cables. The good news: the difference is entirely in the preparation, not the drilling.
Three things decide whether a mount is safe and looks professional: what your wall is made of and how you fix into it, how you route the cables, and getting the height right for comfortable viewing. Get those three right and the rest is straightforward. Here's what to know about each.
Everything hangs — literally — on this. A modern TV plus a mount is a serious weight cantilevered off a wall, and it must anchor into something solid, never into plasterboard alone. The first job is finding what your wall is made of and where its strength is.
On a timber-framed wall, that strength is the studs — the vertical timbers behind the plasterboard, usually spaced regularly. A stud finder locates them; your mount's bolts go into those, not the hollow gaps between. On solid brick, block or concrete, you fix into the masonry itself with the right masonry anchors.
Never trust plasterboard alone to hold a TV, whatever an anchor's packaging claims. Find the studs (or hit solid masonry) and bolt into those. This one rule prevents the great majority of TVs that end up on the floor.
The wall behind your plasterboard decides how you fix and how confident you can be. Here's the quick read on the common types — and which one calls for extra caution.
| Wall type | How to fix into it | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Timber stud + plasterboard | Locate the studs with a stud finder and bolt through the plasterboard into them. The most common wall — very doable. | Beginner |
| Solid brick or block | Fix straight into the masonry with proper masonry anchors and a masonry drill bit. Extremely strong once done. | Moderate |
| Concrete | Very strong, but needs a hammer drill and concrete anchors. Harder to drill, but holds anything. | Moderate |
| Metal studs or brittle plaster | Metal-framed walls and old lath-and-plaster need special fixings and extra care — this is where getting a pro in is often the wise call. | Get advice |
Not sure what's behind the wall? Tap it. A solid, dull thud is masonry; a light, hollow sound is plasterboard over a frame. Then confirm with a stud finder before you drill a single hole.
The classic mistake is mounting the TV too high — above a fireplace is the usual culprit — leaving everyone craning their necks. A TV should sit at eye level from where you actually watch it, the same as it would in a cinema: the middle of the screen roughly level with your seated eye-line.
For most people sitting on a normal sofa, that puts the centre of the screen somewhere around eye height when seated — often lower on the wall than instinct suggests. Measure it from your actual couch, not by eye while standing at the wall.
Before drilling, cut the TV's shape from cardboard, tape it to the wall at your chosen height, then sit down and look. Two minutes of cardboard saves you from a permanent, neck-aching mistake drilled into the wall.
These are ballpark starting points for the centre of the screen, measured from the floor, for a typical seated viewer. Always sanity-check from your own sofa — seat height and viewing distance shift these.
Nothing undoes a clean mount like a bundle of cables dangling down the wall. There are three tidy options, from easiest to most involved: a surface cable raceway — a slim channel that sticks to the wall and paints over; running cables inside the wall through cavity plates; or a simple cord-cover clipped over them.
Running cables inside the wall gives the cleanest look, but only fits certain walls and needs care around anything electrical. A raceway is the safe, renter-friendly middle ground — nearly invisible once painted, and no cutting into the wall.
Never run a standard power cable inside the wall — that's a job for an electrician with proper in-wall-rated cable and outlets. Signal cables like HDMI are fine to run internally; mains power is not. When in doubt, keep power on the surface.
// Every one of these, in order, first.