3388 Fox & Hound HotWire

Pretty fantastic tester compared to:(a) the price, in view of what my local supply shops were asking for similar Ideal and Fluke products (neither of which could do live circuits), and(b) my network cable tracer, which in the past has worked on AC wiring in a pinch, but doesn't have great rangeI used this unit to trace a ridiculously long bedroom circuit that had a mystery short. I traced something close to 200' of 15 gauge, including through a section of 18" concrete floor that has a 6-inch topping slab on 2 inches of foam insulation over it, and also through about 50' of 12 inch concrete wall, loaded with double rebar.Steering this probe requires a bit of patience, trial and error, and disconnecting a few junction boxes along the way. There's the potential for bleedover into parallel wires, and the signal will propagate through common neutrals (actually a good thing -- caught a few that shouldn't have been!), but with a little bit of attentive use it becomes pretty easy to figure out good from bad leads.As others have stated, NOT a good circuit breaker finder. It'll do in a pinch, but I recommend spending the few bucks on the dedicated tool if that's what you need.The live wire function works flawlessly, the tone generator is adequately loud and discernible, and I got much more use out of the continuity tester than I imagined, mainly because it was already connected to the wires, vs. disconnecting and clipping up my multimeter.So while this tracer doesn't work miracles and has a bit of a learning curve, it's really great at what it does, especially for the price. Wholehearted recommendation.

works as advertised, but did not work very well when I tried to trace a live circuit from an outlet that also had a window air conditioner plugged in. I turned off that A/C unit and unplugged it and then was able to use the Hound to trace the path from the outlet back to the main panel, which is only about 10 feet away.I already knew what breaker in the panel was involved, but I tried to see if the Hound would tell me. As Triplett says in their video, there are far better tools for identifying the exact breaker.

This is a pretty good unit for tracing wires behind the walls and through the attic. They do warn though, that if your traced wire gets bundled anywhere, you will have signal bleed into those adjacent wires. You do. You can scale back the signal strength to combat this though. In my case, It's pretty much hopeless trying to find a particular breaker attached to an outlet though. At least 8 breakers had a VERY strong signal, none of which were the actual breaker I was looking for. They include the true trace functionality that should help in this case, but they make a reference that it's not to be used with the packaged hound. Eh, just leaves room for more accessories to compliment the signal generator.

I've got what I call the "shot-gun". That one it the big one with the hand held wand, "looking' underground long distances for the wide range.the second one is the '22'. That one is the absolute wire in the panel. the extreme detail compared to the shotgun Blast, you might say.Well, this one...This one is the combo of what I explained.I still use those other two when the detail is extremely needed or the wide/deep range is needed but this one is not as wide range of 70ft underground at 700 ft away nor is it the absolute "22" accuracy of the sencond one explained.This is a great unit all around.Strongly recommend6 YEARS LATER....This guy still works like a champ!I am now retired but use it often enough to keep handy to grab easily and conveniently.It's a great piece of equipment for anyone who does any kind of electrical work as a pro or as I am now, an old retired guy who can't stop working on someone's electrical when needed!Battery life span is longer than a year in mine. I just replaced the 9V in the receiver of it even though it was still a good battery, being a couple years old at this point or even longer.Very reliable. A great tool for the sparky to find what he's looking for in the walls, the other side of the building or even underground at some level.I would make sure I had this if life started all over as a sparky again! It's something everyone needs in their life.