Finding mains wiring inside walls

If you know any telephone engineers, ask if you can borrow their "tone and amp". It's basically a signal generator that produces a 1Khz signal. After disconnecting the mains wiring from the power (ONLY use this on DEAD wiring, NOT LIVE), connect the "tone" (as it's affectionately known) to a pair of wires and you then use the amplifier to listen for the tone and trace the route.

This is a bit expensive for a trial in case the foil masks the tone (hence my suggestion to borrow one first) but this is the sort of thing

Put up some shelves. Nothing detects wiring quite like the process of screwing shelf brackets to walls. ;-)

(I sympathise, by the way - I have the same problem at our house. I was just trying to trace some of the older wiring last week, too, with a view to replacing it - so being able to find an exact path would be handy for me as well)

cheers

Jules

Maplin do a similarish one, but a lot cheaper.

Tone generator won't work through the foil. You need to get a Cat & Genny. You can Hire them

them

them

q.v. :-

That depends - it may do or it may not. I can still hear the tone well, even when working on screened telephone cables so the tone does penetrate through _that_ foil. My only concern in this case is that I don't know how thick the foil backing on the boards is, nor how deep the cables are beneath the foil.