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Can we talk about that $120 cable tester I bought that barely worked?
I picked up this fancy digital cable tester from a supply house in Orlando about 6 months ago. It was supposed to check alarm cables for continuity, shorts, and even tell you the distance to a break. Cost me $120 flat. First job I used it on, a simple 4-wire run for a door sensor, it said the cable was fine. But when I hooked up the sensor at final, nothing. Spent 45 minutes re-checking every connection before I got my old analog tester out. That cheap meter found a broken wire inside the wall in about 10 seconds. The fancy one never showed it. Now that thing sits in my truck, and I only use it for a paperweight. Anyone else get burned by a tool that promised way more than it delivered?
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parkera2228d ago
Man, that "said the cable was fine" part really gets me. I've been there with a fancy tool that just flat out lied to me, and it makes you feel like you wasted your money and your time.
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A buddy of mine from down in Fort Myers bought one of those big-name digital cable testers a couple years back. He was working on a job for a new security system at a bank, and that tester kept saying all his Cat6 runs were perfect. After three days of install and going back to fix intermittent issues, he finally ran an old plain continuity test with a basic tone generator. Turns out one of his patch cables in the panel was bad, but the fancy tester never caught it. He still talks about how that $150 brick cost him a whole Saturday of his life.
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