Tried using a fish tape to pull a coax through a wall and got stuck for an hour

I was running a line through an exterior wall in a house built in 1972 near Cleveland. The fish tape got twisted up inside some old blown-in insulation and I couldn't pull it forward or backward. After 45 minutes of wiggling and cussing, I had to cut a hole in the drywall to free it. Learned that old insulation is a beast and you gotta use a glow rod for those deep runs. Anybody else deal with insulation that fights back like that?

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joseph4487h ago

Man that sounds like a total nightmare lol. Blown in insulation from the 70s is evil stuff, it just crumbles and clumps up around anything you try to push through it. I had a similar fight running Cat6 through a wall in my grandpa's old place and ended up just using a glow rod for the whole thing cause the fish tape kept getting hung up on that loose fill junk. You're definitely not alone on that one, cutting drywall is sometimes the only way to win that battle.