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Spent $400 on a thermal imaging camera and it just found a hot neutral in a panel I was about to sign off on.
What's your go-to tool that's paid for itself by catching a problem you would've missed?
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hunt.jennifer6mo ago
My buddy's cheap voltage tester beeped at a light switch last month. He almost didn't check it, thought it was a fluke. Turned out the whole box was back-fed from another circuit, someone had tied neutrals together in a crazy way. That little ten dollar tool saved him from a callback and a real headache.
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henry_anderson546mo ago
Ever think like matthew897 that it's just messy? I did until a back-fed box nearly fried a fixture I was working on.
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the_faith4mo ago
Yeah that cheap little Klein NCVT was the best money I ever spent. I had a similar situation a few years back where I was replacing a ceiling fan and got a weird beep from the tester. Pulled the old box and found the previous guy had tied the fan's neutral into a switch leg from another room. The fan was getting power through the ground path from that other circuit. I would have never caught it without that tester. It saved me from getting zapped bad or causing a short that could have started a fire. Sometimes the cheap stuff does the job.
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matthew8976mo ago
But is a back-fed box actually dangerous or just messy wiring? It sounds more like a code violation than something that would cause immediate harm. Those testers beep for a lot of things, not all of them are critical. I've seen similar stuff that just meant the light wouldn't turn off right, not that it was a fire waiting to happen. Sometimes a headache is just fixing bad work, not preventing disaster.
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