Spent 3 hours hunting a short until I tried the hair dryer trick

Had a service call on a 15-year-old house in Phoenix where the porch light kept tripping the breaker. I pulled every damn box apart looking for a chafed wire or a bad splice. Finally remembered an old timer told me to hit suspect junction boxes with a hair dryer on high heat for 2 minutes. Sure enough the insulation softened just enough on a buried wire nut that it started arcing and tripped again. Has anyone else used heat to find intermittent shorts?

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derekjenkins27d ago

Hair dryer trick beats my method of just crying in the crawlspace.