A crawl space in Spokane taught me to always check the whole run

I was on a service call for a weak signal in a house built in the 70s. The homeowner said two other techs had already replaced the wall plate and the splitter. I spent an extra twenty minutes tracing the line from the pole to the house and found the real problem. Someone had patched a section of the main line with a cheap coupler that was half full of water. Has anyone else found a hidden fault like that after others gave up?

3 comments

3 Comments

joel_adams791mo ago

Oh man, that's the worst! I've seen those cheap couplers fail so many times. Water gets in and just kills the signal. Good on you for checking the whole run, that's the only way to find stuff like that. The last guy probably just wanted a quick fix and didn't want to get dirty.

simonsingh1mo ago

But is it always a coupler problem? Sometimes the cable itself degrades over time. I've seen plenty of cases where replacing the coupler didn't fix a thing.

patricia781mo ago

Simon makes a good point about cable degradation. I've pulled up plenty of old buried lines where the jacket was cracked and the center conductor looked green. Joel_adams79 is right that a lot of guys just swap the coupler at the tap because it's easy. But how do you actually test for a bad cable section without replacing the whole thing first? Do you use a TDR or just ohm it out?