Picking the right anchor for the wall you have

The anchor does not hold the weight. The wall does. Choosing well is mostly a matter of working out what is behind the paint before you drill.

If you can hit a stud, use a wood screw long enough to bite about an inch into solid timber and skip the anchor entirely — nothing you buy will beat it. If you cannot, the anchor's job is to spread your load across as much of a thin, brittle panel as possible. Everything below follows from that.

First, work out what the wall is

Drill a small pilot hole somewhere it will not matter and look at the dust. Drywall gives fine white powder and the bit pushes through in a few seconds into a hollow cavity. Plaster over lath gives grittier grey dust and you will feel the bit hit wood strips behind. Plaster over masonry and brick or block resist hard, throw reddish or grey grit, and need a masonry bit and usually a hammer drill. Older Yonkers buildings frequently have plaster over lath in the older rooms and drywall in anything renovated, sometimes on the same floor.

Anchors for hollow walls

Published capacities assume half-inch drywall in good condition, a correctly sized hole and a load pulling straight down the wall rather than straight out of it. Real capacity is lower, sometimes much lower. Treat the numbers on the packet as a ranking rather than a promise, and derate anything that hangs out from the wall — a bracket that projects a foot multiplies the pull-out force at the anchor considerably.

Plaster and lath deserve their own paragraph

Old plaster is brittle and it crumbles rather than compresses. Expansion anchors are a poor idea because the expanding action is what breaks the plaster around the hole. Toggles work well because they clamp rather than expand. Drill slowly, without hammer action, and consider a strip of painter's tape over the spot to stop the surface chipping as the bit breaks through.

Masonry: brick, block and concrete

Here the anchor grips solid material, so the choices are simpler and the capacities much higher.

Concrete screws (the blue ones) cut their own thread into a pre-drilled hole and suit light and medium loads. Get the hole diameter right: too big and the threads have nothing to cut into. Sleeve and wedge anchors expand against the hole wall and carry serious weight. In hollow block, aim for the solid webs rather than the voids, or use a sleeve anchor long enough to grip the far side of the shell.

Two practical notes. Drill deeper than the anchor is long, because the dust has to go somewhere — and blow or vacuum the hole out before fitting, since packed dust is the most common reason a masonry anchor spins. And in brick, fixing into the mortar joint is easier and weaker than fixing into the brick itself; for anything structural, go into the brick.

When to stop and find a stud

Some things should not go on anchors at all. Anything overhead, anything a person might grab or pull on, anything holding a television, and anything whose failure would hurt somebody: find framing, or use a mounting plate spanning two studs. A grab bar in particular is a load-bearing safety fitting and belongs on solid backing, not on hollow-wall anchors, whatever the packet claims.

Where to start

The fasteners and hardware department stocks plastic plugs, threaded anchors, togglers, concrete screws and sleeve anchors, and we sell by the piece as well as by the box — useful when a job needs four of something rather than a hundred. Bring the old fixing or a photo of the wall and the bracket if you are not sure; sorting it at the counter takes a minute and saves a hole.

If the job also involves drilling masonry, the tools department carries the drills and the bits to go with them.