How To Know Where Electrical Wires Are In Wall

While in the ceiling there was a tendency to run across the grain driving tubes thru each joist to house an individual wire and sometimes along the joists sometimes when joining outlets they.

How to know where electrical wires are in wall. This approach has a drawback though. There may be electrical wires behind the wall that your drill can come into contact with that can be severed or worse give you a nasty shock. When work is done on the wall or the wires need to be located it is impossible to see where they are. Test the electronic detector in a know area where electrical wires exist to make sure it is operating properly.

If the wires run up the wall then you should know roughly where the cables will run. Work with a partner one of you should stay at the breaker box to flip the switch and the other should observe which outlets get power. After getting everything ready the approximate size of the opening is traced on the wall. To take the proper precautions use a wire or circuit tracer to find the exact location of an electrical wire in your wall.

For a heavy bookcase i would rely on an l bracket using toggle anchors pictured below in the wall. Even screwing into a wire ran through a bored hole would be hard because unless the hole is really small or there are a lot of wires the screw will push the wire out of the way. If the sectioning off part of the wall is in the process another way around the issue of electrical wires should tracers or scanners not be available is by using a drill and a 3 8 or 1 2 9 or 12 mm drill bit. Step 4 detect wires.

Use your electric wire detector to find out exactly where the wires run through the walls. These devices use a transmitter which generates an electronic signal and a receiver that uses this signal to test the wall for wires. For homes old enough to have tube knob wiring two single wires there was a tendency to run wires to the top of a room then drop them to their fixtures along stud spaces at least in my area. Before drilling find out exactly where the wiring is.

Drilling into a live wire is dangerous and could result. If possible mark the location of suspected cables on the wall in pencil.