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I used to ohm out every run by hand, now I meter a whole panel in 15 minutes with one gadget
When I started pulling wire back around 2005, testing a zone meant grabbing the analog meter, finding a ground, and poking every contact one at a time to see if the loop read right. On a 60 zone panel that could eat half your afternoon, especially in a hot attic where you are sweating through your shirt by zone 12. Now I clip on a zone tester, walk the building, and it beeps or it does not, and I can check the whole can in about 15 minutes. I still keep the old meter in the truck because it has saved me twice this year on a ground fault that the fancy tool just read as fine. What bugs me is that the young guys on my crew trust the beep and never learn what the numbers actually mean, so when the tester says all good but a door still shows open, they are stuck. I am not saying the old way was better, my knees sure do not miss the attic crawling, but there was a lot of learning in those slow afternoons. Anybody else still carry the old meter just for the weird jobs?
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grantnelson21h ago
How do you get the young guys to actually sit down with the analog meter when they know the tester gets them out of the attic faster? I came up the same way and the slow poking is where you learn what a ground fault or a short actually looks like on the needle, not just a beep. The problem is you can't teach that in 15 minutes, it takes a few bad afternoons and some callbacks before it clicks. Curious what you do when the tester reads clean but the door still shows open, do you make them chase it with the old meter first?
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