Old school trick for wiring zones that still works better than apps

I was on a job in Pawtucket last week, old Victorian with plaster walls, and my panel kept giving me a ground fault on zone 3. After an hour of tracing wires with my meter, I remembered some old timer taught me to just blow compressed air down the conduit before pulling new wire. Did that and found a staple had pinched through the jacket, swapped the run in 20 minutes. Has anyone else gone back to basic troubleshooting instead of relying on the diagnostic software?

2 comments

2 Comments

ramirez.sage12d agoTop Commenter

Oh man, I gotta push back on this one. I mean sure, compressed air is fine for clearing dust, but I've been burned by "old school" tricks way too many times. Last month I spent two hours trying to find a short in a ceiling light using a basic meter and it turned out to be a bad neutral in the switch box that any decent diagnostic tool would have caught in like 5 minutes. The apps and software aren't perfect but they save me from guessing and checking all day. There's definitely a place for both but I'm not going back to just relying on air and a prayer when I can get actual data from a tool.

barbara_taylor8311d ago

Had a very similar situation with a kitchen outlet last year. A bad neutral in a junction box that just looked fine visually, but a basic continuity test didn't catch it because it was intermittent. The $80 circuit analyzer I borrowed from a buddy spotted it in two minutes. I still keep a can of compressed air in my truck for blowing out panels and cleaning crap off connectors, but I learned the hard way that some "old school" methods just don't cut it anymore. You can't always feel or see a loose connection, can you?