Cable trunking or chasing into the wall: which route for a new socket?

Surface trunking on the wall — quick and cheap

Trunking is a plastic channel screwed or glued to the wall face, with the cable clipped inside and a snap-on lid over the top. There is no cutting into plaster or concrete, so the job goes fast: a socket added this way is often finished within the hour, sometimes on the same visit as the quote.

It costs less because there is no chasing, no plastering, no drying time and no repainting the whole wall afterwards. It also leaves no dust in the flat, which matters if you are living in the rooms while the work happens rather than moving out for a few days.

The trade-off is visible. White or grey trunking along a skirting board or up to a light switch is fine in a utility room, a garage, or behind a wardrobe, and it is a sensible short-term fix if you are not sure yet where the socket should end up. In a living room or a freshly renovated kitchen it tends to look like exactly what it is: a patch.

Chasing the wall — a tidier result, but more work

Chasing means cutting a groove into the wall with an angle grinder or a wall chaser, laying the cable inside, fixing it with plaster or clips, and then filling and skimming the groove flush. Once painted over, the cable is invisible and the wall reads as one continuous surface.

It takes longer for an obvious reason: cutting, filling, drying and finishing are separate steps, and the plaster needs time to cure properly before it can be painted. A single socket run might take a day from cutting to a paintable surface; a longer run for several sockets or a new light circuit takes more.

It also makes more mess. Chasing concrete or brick produces genuine dust, and even with a vacuum attachment on the grinder some of it settles on nearby surfaces. Furniture needs covering or moving, and the room is not really usable again until the plaster has dried and been painted.

Which walls will not let you chase

Chasing is not always an option, and this is the point worth checking before you commit to a plan. A load-bearing wall should not be cut into beyond a shallow, carefully placed groove, because removing material weakens exactly the part of the building doing structural work; we do not chase load-bearing walls, and a guide that reaches this point should send you to a structural specialist rather than guess.

Concrete panel walls, common in Soviet-era blocks across Tallinn, are reinforced with steel mesh a few centimetres in. Chasing deep enough to bury a cable risks hitting that reinforcement, which is both hard on the tools and a real structural concern. In practice, panel walls are usually a case for trunking, or for running the cable through the floor or ceiling void instead.

Stud partitions and old wooden-framed walls, the kind found in many Kalamaja and Nõmme houses, are a different case again: there is often a cavity behind the plasterboard or lath, so the cable can go inside the wall without any chasing of the surface at all, which is usually the neatest and cheapest outcome of all three.

• Load-bearing walls: no chasing beyond a shallow surface groove; ask a structural specialist first
• Concrete panel walls: reinforcement mesh close to the surface makes deep chasing risky
• Solid brick or block partition walls: chasing is usually straightforward
• Stud or lath-and-plaster partitions: often hollow, so the cable can run inside without chasing at all

The price gap and what causes it

For one added socket on a solid wall, trunking usually means an hour or so of electrical work and the cost of the channel itself, which is modest. Chasing the same run adds the cutting time, the plastering and drying, and often a second short visit to paint once the plaster has cured, so the total is noticeably higher for what is electrically the same job.

The gap grows with distance. A metre of chasing near a socket is a small job; running a chase across a room to a new light point, through a doorway, or up to a ceiling rose is a much larger one, because every extra metre of groove is more cutting, more filling and more drying time before the wall looks finished.

Electrical work is charged from 49 € per hour, and a straightforward socket installation from 35 € per job; the exact figure depends on the wall type, the cable run and whether plastering is included, and for anything beyond a single socket we give a fixed quote after seeing the site or a few photos, valid for 30 days.

What we would choose in an ordinary Tallinn home

For a rented flat, a temporary fix, or a utility space where looks are not the priority, trunking is the sensible choice: it is quick, it is reversible, and it does not commit you to a wall finish you might want to change later.

For a room you are decorating properly, or where you are already repainting anyway, chasing is worth the extra cost on a solid wall, because the result matches the rest of the surface and there is nothing to work around later. On a concrete panel wall, though, we would steer you towards trunking or a floor-void route rather than risk cutting into the reinforcement.

If you are not sure which applies to your wall, the honest answer is that it is worth asking before deciding, since guessing wrong means either a groove that should not have been cut or a length of trunking you did not need to live with.