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David David is offline
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Default Do "volt sticks" work on armoured cable?

On Fri, 18 Mar 2016 19:04:33 +0000, newshound wrote:

On 3/18/2016 6:44 PM, David Lang wrote:
On 18/03/2016 18:28, Tim+ wrote:
Following an episode of depriving three flats of mains power for 8
hours I thought I'd buy some of those cheap volt sticks mentioned here
recently.

Seem to work fine on ordinary cable but not on my armoured incomer. I
suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this but clearly they're not gonna
stop me drilling into another armoured cable. ;-)

Out of interest, would the type of armour make a difference (say steel
versus copper)?

Tim

They aren't meant to be cable detectors. Surely a proper detector
would be better?


Never heard of copper armour. I'm not too surprised that they don't
detect live SWA cable, especially at any distance. However a good "metal
detector" ought to work, also consider a rare earth magnet which (I
guess) might pick it up through up to a centimetre of plaster, but
probably not much further.


I do recall a Mr. Terry P mentioning standing outside in a thunderstorm in
wet copper armour shouting "All Gods are *******s!" but this probably does
not relate to your issue :-)



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