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Breaker locator accuracy

I just bought a "Commercial Electric" HCS 500 breaker locator second hand that looks identical to the older two-prong Sperry Breaker locator, other than color of plastic casing, which is red rather than yellow. I tried it on my panel and it worked well to locate one circuit, but for another it seems to produce a tone over several breakers, even with dial turned to the lowest setting, ie still on, but below which it would produce no tone anywhere over any candidate breaker.

My panel is an older Square D with linear buses that have five circuits with

14-3 wire tapped off adjacent spaces on same bus, ie sychronous, so I'm not sure if that circuit that I was unable to isolate was on one of those split circuits.

Is there a trick, or are these tools limited in their accuracy with particular circuits? I noticed another brand has a wand, would that be more accurate?

Thanks,

Peter

Reply to
Peter Shepherd
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All of them will give false positives. We had one at work, you would plug in the sender and then go to the panel and guess which was the right breaker. I found that I was only sure when I turned off the correct breaker and the tone went away.

Reply to
SQLit

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