Loading…
20
Can we talk about how I refused to use a toner probe for 2 years and that was just dumb pride
When I started out in Reno back in 2019, my old lead told me a toner probe was a crutch for guys who could not trace wire by hand, so I never bought one. About 6 months ago I got stuck on a 40 zone panel install in a half finished office building in Sparks and spent 4 hours chasing a buried CAT6 run through a ceiling full of old phone cable. My new helper pulled out a $60 Fluke and had the pair tagged in under 10 minutes, and I just stood there feeling like a mule. Any of you still avoiding a tool because a guy with 30 years on you called it cheating?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
ryanburns3d ago
Man, come on, the old lead was not totally wrong. A toner is a crutch, and crutches make you weak if you lean on them from day one. Plenty of guys in this trade can't find a short in a j-box without their little wand singing at them, and then the battery dies or the tone bleeds into every pair in the bundle and they're just as lost as you were in Sparks. That helper tagged your run in 10 minutes, sure, but he probably couldn't tell you why the tone jumped or what the layout even looked like when he was done, he just pointed at the beeper. You spent two years learning to read the wire with your hands and eyes, and now the tool actually adds something instead of replacing something. The mule feeling is just the price of being stubborn, and stubborn is how you get good.
7