Update: I thought those new 'smart' circuit finders were just a gimmick for easy money.

I was wiring a new outlet in my kitchen last month and my old tone and probe unit gave me a false positive, nearly cutting into a live wire. A buddy lent me his Klein Tools ET310, which maps the whole circuit and shows the breaker number. I rolled my eyes at first, but after it found the right breaker in under 30 seconds on a crowded panel, I was sold. It even found a shared neutral I didn't know about. The $60 price tag seemed steep until it saved me an hour of flipping breakers and guessing. Has anyone else made the switch and found it actually worth the cash for bigger jobs?

2 comments

2 Comments

evangarcia9d ago

Honestly, the safety check alone is worth it. My old method missed a bootleg ground once, and I only caught it because the tester threw an error code. It wasn't just about finding the breaker, it flagged a real problem I would have walked away from.

taylor.susan9d ago

Oh man, @evangarcia, you are so right. That exact thing happened to me last year. I was about to swap out an outlet and my tester lit up with that weird open ground error. Turns out someone had jumped the ground to the neutral right in the box. It freaked me out, thinking I almost left a real hazard behind. Those little tools do way more than just find the right breaker.