Locating cables somewhere...

[Mike Deblis]

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

[Stefek Zaba]

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

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