Mains detector

[Sideways]

This is the one I have, just googled and it’s more expensive than I remember. I honestly don’t even use it anymore. I tried again recently when wall mounting a tv in my office. It told me there was a live cable where I wanted to drill, I thought about it for a moment and realised there wasn’t, and sure enough when I drilled, no live cable in sight.

Yes. My Bosch is the same or it's immediate predecessor. Doesn't provide a trustworthy reading so not worth the money. You must do the hand on the wall thing with these.

 

[Luckosaurous]

Yes. My Bosch is the same or it's immediate predecessor. Doesn't provide a trustworthy reading so not worth the money. You must do the hand on the wall thing with these.

What’s the hand on the wall thing? I didn’t see that in the instructions on mine (I did actually read them for once because the performance of this thing is so poor)

 

[Sideways]

Read my post above, #7 in this thread.

 

[naughtymoose]

What you are paying for is certainty, in a working enviroment as an electrician you must have a device that gives a very high level of certainty but for domestic use then it is not viable and you have to buy devices like the Bosch that work but with much lower levels of certainty and accept that you may just damage a wire even if you take all the possible precautions but you can isolate the supply to make the drilling operation safer and worst case the 30mA protective device will trip and you end up with a repair.

If you want a decent detector that also has signal injection then this is what you want

https://www.test-meter.co.uk/fluke-2042-cable-locator

I had one of those. The instruction manual was hilarious. I even telephoned Fluke about it.

one pfrase in particular was memorable-
"parallelly to and back". It obviously lost something in translation from the original Chinese!

 

[Fergie 307]

What’s the hand on the wall thing? I didn’t see that in the instructions on mine (I did actually read them for once because the performance of this thing is so poor)

I had a Bosch one, my kids toy metal detector was better!
My sparkie has one of the Fluke gadgets, very impressive. I thought I must get one of those, until he told me the price, ouch.