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JRSutton 12-03-2012 12:50:51 75.130.109.233 Report to Moderator	with roots in the telecom world - I always use a tone generator with an inductive pickup. Puts a wobbling tone on the line and you can poke around with the the pickup to pickout the wires at the other end without going down to bare metal. Very handy - you'd want the circuit to be dead of course. They probably even sell them at home depot these days. No idea what they cost. [Reply]   [No Email]
downsouth 12-03-2012 14:36:24 64.12.116.141 Report to Moderator	Re: Electric tool question in reply to JRSutton, 12-03-2012 12:50:51   The tone generator sounds like an interesting option, but I thought they were stricltly for low volatage, correct me if I'm wrong. I assume that's why you say the line should be dead. That would indeed work for what I want to do. Others mentioned a radio. I've done that before and it works pretty good if your close enough to hear the radio. The breaker boxes to this old place are in a workshop that is attached to the house and it would work fine for some of the closer rooms but I'm afraid I'll never hear it in the distant rooms. That and the fact the wiring out to the barn is run underground from the house, no way to ever hear the radio out there. PO had a washer and dryer in the barn at one time and there are 3 sets of Romex running up the barn wall. When I added some lighting to a storage area in the barn, I ran an extension cord from the barn to the house with a drop light on it to figure out which breaker I needed to kill and that turned out to be one of the old screw in fuses. I've now come to the conclusion I need to pinpoint everthing and mark in the boxes what is what. I like the number idea too, just have a laminated piece of paper nearby with the numbers corosponding to what each breaker feeds. Earlier this year we had a lightning strike either nearby or on the house. All the lights flashed and the surge protectors did their jobs as we lost nothing electronic but about 10 minutes after the strike we could smell smoke. No way to pinpoint where it was coming from and then I could see some smoke at the ceiling in a center room. I killed all the breakers and called the fire department (volunteer). They said their was a night light on in the center rooms and asked if I indeed did cut off all the breakers. Sure enough I forgot the screw in fuses so I now know where at least one of those goes! The chief had a heat sensor and found a hot wall in another room. I felt the wall and his sensor was right. He offered to open the wall, I said go for it. There was a wall outlet that had partially melted along with several feet of wire. It burnt the paper on the sheetrock and smoked the stud pretty good, it seems I may have killed the power just in time. He pulled out a piece of wire and took a close look at it. It seem at some point in time the PO had spliced into a wire to add the outlet. The original house wire is the old cloth coverd wire (no ground) and he added a few feet of lamp cord and electrical tape to run to the outlet. I ended up capping off the old cloth covered wire prior to the half azz splice and eliminated the outlet completely, but have never done anything else other than close the wall back up but not finished. This is why I want to narrow some of this hodgepodge mess down so I can begin getting rid of the old unsafe stuff on a shoestring budget. If I had the money I would hire an electrician and be done with it, but it's just not that way. [Reply]  [No Email]