Hi
I am a handyman and have run into an electrical nightmare. I was hired to fix the doorbells in a medical care facility. Normally a doorbell circuit is one of the easiest things to fix, but this time it's near impossible to trace the wires. The reason is that the wires are in an attic crawl space. They are buried in insulation, the building is nearly a city block long, and twists and turns every which way. The attic has fireblocks where the wires vanish into the next section and there is no way to continue the trace from section to section, and the worst part of all, there are literally a million wires up there. (computer network, fire alarm, phones, cable tv, thermostats, patient alarm calls, security, electric door locks, intercom, speaker system, and more.......)
To add to the mess, there are 2 doorbell chimes, and 6 door buttons, and no one knows which chime should be on which button, and the transformers are nowhere to be found (but there is power).
With all of this, I have come to the conclusion there is no possible way to physically trace the wires. I have already spent hours in that attic, got myself stuck up there, pulled wires out of insulation for hundreds of feet, only to find they get lost in a firewall, and there are a dozen more identical looking wires on the other side of that firewall (if I can even get to the other side). Some parts of that attic are impossible to access.
My reason for posting this is I seem to recall some sort of radio device that connects to a wire and sends a radio signal into the wire. Then there is a probe that I would carry that will sense that signal but only from the wire(s) that the transmitter is connected, and not any other wires. Maybe I am dreaming, but it seems to me that I once saw something like this advertised. The problem is that I have no idea what to look for on the web or elsewhere. (what's this thing called?). Additionally, I think the device actually tells where there is an open or shorted wire.
This seems to be the only way that I can fix this mess. Further tracing the existing wires, or running new wires would both require extensive removal of walls and ceilings, because the attic is the only way to run wires. There is no basement, and the very strict codes will not allow surface wiring, not even for a low voltage doorbell.
Can anyone help me locate a device like this, please.
PS. Crawling around in the attic, amongst all these wires and pipes, etc. is most likely what dislodged the doorbell wires in the first place. There are places where heating ducts only allow 10 inches to crawl under them on my belly, and in insulation, balanced on only two rafters. It dont take much to get stuck on a wire and rip it apart. I suspect this is what happened, because none of the wires from the buttons are showing up at the chime, using a multimeter, and shorting the button wires. Somewhere in all that mess, one or more wires got ripped apart, and/or the building has had several additions added to it, which only complicates things more.
Thanks
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Weasel