Ek's Home   |   Forum   |   Chat   |   Electrical Links   |
	Subject - residential troubleshooting lctrc789 As many of you know my 2 sons run a service truck for a small residential business I have as well as what I do for a living doing industrial work and designs and layouts. I have 2 toners (like the phone comapny uses) they are inductance amplifiers really. The kind that send a tone through a wire for identifying etc. Many years ago I found that if you turn these babies up all the way and hold them to the walls of any a/c circuit they buzz and can almost trace out romex or any wiring in the walls. I have found bad romex, cut romex, broken knob and tube etc, with a few of these. I do have a small fluorescent bulb fixture that plugs in like a satndard recpt. it makes a terrible inductance and this thing works well this way. I have found it is great for troubleshooting many residential problems. Hope this can help some of you down the road. skynrd Yes this works well also for marking ckts in an upgrade when your by yourself and the original panel wasn't marked. Shut the breaker off and hook the tone generator up at the panel and proceed to walk from room to room. When you get into a room and you toner starts going off turn the gain almost all the way down and then start looking for the tone at each individual device to make sure your not just reading wires passing through the wall and to confirm which devices are all on that circuit. blackrd Were talking about 2 diffrent things here. A tone box and a tone chaser. The box clips to the wires and imposes a solid or chiming tone. The "tone stick" is the amplifier and is handheld. You can get a better one for about $80 that has a filter on it. If you clipped on at a splice and were trying to locate in the panel, you can filter out a bunch of the noise. These work well also in communications closets where a bunch of equipment would really put a hum on your unfiltered probe.