Locating cables somewhere...
 

Hi,

It always happens - we have just had some carpet laid in an outbuilding and
so the floor is not easily accessible.

There is a water heater in there (small tank) and the leads to the heater
are dead. I can't find where the electrician has fed these cables from, and
so want to trace them under the floor before I rip everything apart...

Any ideas how I can trace the dead cables from upstairs through the carpet
and or in the ceiling of downstairs? Is there some sort of signal injector
that can be used? The cables are electrically dead (or seem to be) which
implies that they have been disconnected.... somewhere...

Thanks

Mike

Mike Deblis wrote:


Any ideas how I can trace the dead cables from upstairs through the carpet
and or in the ceiling of downstairs? Is there some sort of signal injector
that can be used? The cables are electrically dead (or seem to be) which
implies that they have been disconnected.... somewhere...

There are, but the commercial ones are pricey to buy, I don't know where
to rent them from, and at least the model I'm familiar with traces live
mains cables rather'n dead 'uns.

So, in the spirit of uk.d-i-y, and pretending that whoever the
Radiotelecommunications Authority have morphed into aren't listening ;-)
- try looking on the net for words like 'AM "radio bug" circuit'.
There's one (allegedly ;-) at
http://www.discovercircuits.com/PDF-...IPEFINDER1.pdf
which even claims to have worked well in detecting the course of a
water-filled plastic pipe, with the 'broadcast' antenna pushed into one
end of the pipe - thus answering an earlier query here!

The idea of such circuits is to generate a low-power characteristic tone
(the one I refer to seems to be a 1kHz tone on a 530kHz carrier) which
you can pick up with an AM (medium wave) radio, using the vaguely
directional character of the set's ferrite aerial to help with the location.

HTH - Stefek