Tracing residential wires

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Learning Always

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Location
Mn
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Maintenance electrician / Pt licensed contractor
How accurately can you guys tone and follow wires throughout a typical residential setting? Can you follow a wire and tell exactly where a buried jbox or splice has gone bad, drill a hole and be spot on? I use a fluke pro 3000 hook it up to the neutral and hot and I can tell what openings are on the circuit and roughly follow the path of the wire behind drywall but with very low confidence. Just curious how accurately others can trace wires out and what they are using.
 
Was the ground and neutral completely severed or was the staple shorting them together? Is the amprobe you use an older model or still available today? I have heard the sure trace works but it is quite spendy.
 
Learning Always said:
Was the ground and neutral completely severed or was the staple shorting them together? Is the amprobe you use an older model or still available today? I have heard the sure trace works but it is quite spendy.
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The staple was shorting them together. The arc fault breaker would not set. It’s an older model that’s getting hard to find. The advantage that it has over SureTrace and others, is it draws a current pulse off the line, instead of injecting a signal which bleeds over, and can travel quite a ways past the problem. The downside is, you must have a circuit loop that is energized or can be energized using batteries. But that makes it deadly accurate. Fluke bought Amprobe out, and changed the design. I don’t know if the new style works the same.
 
My Triplett Fox and Hound works on live circuits and is really accurate unless the system has a lot of noise. Then I would need to shut the system down to get a clean signal.
 
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