Hey guys, the other day I had a problem tracing a wire and I used a method I?ve used for years. It just occurred to me that I don?t kn ow if it?s something that everybody knows or not.
This was the problem. I ran about a hundred fifty cat 6 wires for both netw ork and telephone in a 5000 square foot office. The office was originally m eant to be two individual office spaces and separated by a thick fire wall. A bunch of the network wires ran through the fire wall to the other side. There are ceiling tiles at about 16 feet. One of those wires was for the pu rpose of carrying a signal to an 82 inch TV on the other side of the firewa ll that was mounted about 10 feet off the floor. The wire was supposed to b e running from a cable box in a utility closet on the other side of the fir e wall via an HDMI extender.. In back of the wall with the TV are two small rooms. One a bathroom and one a storage closet both with only 8 foot ceili ng tiles. In order to get to the back of the TV the ceiling grid needs to b e disassembled and an extension ladder maneuvered into the small room and p ut up to see over the wall to the back of the TV. Something I had planned t o only have to do once when connecting the TV to the HDMI extender.
Well the owner decides that he doesn?t want the cable box in the ut ility closet. He wants it moved to another closet in another office. Now, -
--- I have the TV wire in the utility closet labeled out of the hundred or so network wires but all the wires are bundled, and tied into a cable and m ounted to the network rack and shelves. That is, ---- the wires aren? ?t just loose and hanging going up through the ceiling from the closet be low. Above the ceiling above the closet I can see that there are 20 or so w ires coming through the fire wall from the direction of the TV. So above th e ceiling, I can?t tell which wire in that bundle is the one from t he TV .
OK, so I take out my wire signal tracer and attach it to the wire end in th e utility closet and discover that I?m not getting signal. I can on ly surmise that when I pulled the wires over to the TV I stripped them all, twisted them together so I could reduced the size of the wires I had to pu t through the hook in my snake. So now the bare wires are shorted behind th e TV and I can?t get a signal from my wire tracer up in the ceiling above the utility closet so that I know which wire to pull back up from th e closet to re-route to the other closet.
And remember, I can't see where the wires are in the closet from above and I?m working alone on an extension ladder and I don?t have a nyone to try and tug on the wire from below.
I found the wire in less than 5 minutes.
How would you do it?