Cable tracers: are they reliable? Alternatives?

[joth]

In 1st fix I'm planning to drop a bunch of spare cables into the service voids and ceilings, behind the plasterboard. Mostly for speaker cables and cat5, maybe a few HDMI drops and T&E runs.

 

Aside from liberal use of photographs and marking up plans, what tricks to people use to locate them afterwards?

 

I know there are various cable tracer tools available that inject a frequency into a dry cable and then have a probe to trace them out. As usual there's many options for a couple £10s on amazon/aliexpress, or the Fluke variant for about £1000 or something crazy. Is this one of those cases where unless you pay the big money for the Fluke it's just going to be junk? Any strong recommendations of a cheap-grade one that works for this sort of use case?

 

Another idea I was wondering about was securely taping neodym magnets to the cables in various places where I anticipate I might want to make an opening to access them in future, then use an external magnet to "feel" out where they are. 

Anyone done anything like that? Things to watch out for? Probably don't want a bunch of neodym magnets buried in the wall right behind where my computer, Hifi or TV is, for example.

 

Other ideas, or tricks of the trade?

 

 

 

[dpmiller]

cheap tone probes work pretty well actually.

[ProDave]

By far the simplest thing is cut all the plasterboard holes as you board the room, then everything reaches it's destination with no guesswork.

 

Remember fixed mains wiring needs to comply with safe zones.  speaker, network, aerial and av cables don't.

[joth]

17 minutes ago, ProDave said:

By far the simplest thing is cut all the plasterboard holes as you board the room, then everything reaches it's destination with no guesswork.

 

 

Sorry, I should have put more emphasis, this is purely for spare cable runs, i.e. ones not needed today but may be used a year or three in the future (when I can afford all the Lovely Things to hang on the ends of the runs)

 

 

30 minutes ago, dpmiller said:

cheap tone probes work pretty well actually.

 

Great! Thanks. I'll grab one to get comfortable with it

Edited June 5, 2020 by joth

[ProDave]

Spare cables, I leave coiled up adjacent to an accessory in use.  Later you can just pop the back box of that accessory out and reach in to retrieve your spare cables.

 

But keep a note and photographs of where they all end up.

[joth]

 

1 minute ago, ProDave said:

Spare cables, I leave coiled up adjacent to an accessory in use.  Later you can just pop the back box of that accessory out and reach in to retrieve your spare cables.

 

 

in a few instances I can see it being a good way from an existing back box. e.g. a couple places I think I might want to put an alarm PIR in future, but the current alarm co. don't want to put one, initially. Putting in a blanking plate is obvious option,  but UK single-gang blanking plates are kinda ugly to put up at ceiling height in full view. Interested if there's a more discreet option.

Thinking about it, alarm PIRs don't normally involve cutting big holes into the plasterboard at all, so I'm not even sure yet what sort of outlet/grommet would normally be used for these. I can see I might just end up putting extra PIRs in everywhere I think I could want one, purely to hide the holes with what would otherwise be  spare cables hanging out of them!