While hammering holes in the wall is an effective way to find wires, it’s not so effective for your home repair budget. There is good news though: there are easy methods of tracing wire in your home so you don’t have to turn your walls into swiss cheese to find them. What if the power goes out though? How do you trace a wire with no power?
How to Trace a Wire With No Power: Tools You’ll Need
To find the wiring in your home or property the best tool is an existing electrical wiring blueprint if it exists. It will give you the best map of your wiring placement. This is especially helpful if you don’t have any power as you can consult the blueprint.
To find wires without any power one of the handiest tools is an electronic stud finder. Most stud finders are equipped to handle finding wooden studs in the wall, but some can also be used to find wires as well.
To find out if a wire is live, you’ll also need a voltage detector. Neon-bulb voltage detectors can easily do the job and are relatively inexpensive. Tone detectors can also tell you if a wire is live by giving off a sound.
If you plan on doing extensive electrical work that requires tools specifically designed for tracing wires, those can be purchased as well, but they tend to be less affordable. This is because they are typically purchased by electrical professionals that work on wiring often.
An Easy Method to Trace a Wire
One of the other key ways to trace your wiring is through the use of your circuit breaker. This method particularly helps if you have your circuit breaker labelled correctly. To help with that, we’ve created a handy guide on how to label your circuit breaker panel.
Make sure all the breakers are off to start, and plug a nightlight – that’s turned on – into the outlet you’re trying to trace wires from. Flip each of the breakers on and off one at a time until the nightlight turns on. Once you’ve determined the circuit it’s on, plug the light into the surrounding outlets to find out which circuit they’re all on as well using the same method. Circuits that run to large appliances, like clothes dryers, often have no other outlets or appliances on the circuit.
Now that you know which circuit all the outlets are connected to, use your electronic stud finder to trace the wires in the walls and then use a voltage detector to test which wires are live.
Make sure to consult any laws, regulations, or building codes regarding your electrical work beforehand.
