Bought a $200 cable toner that saved my bacon on an apartment complex job

Picked up a Klein Tools VDV500-820 toner at Home Depot after fighting with a faulty one for months. Found a bad line in a 12 unit building in under 20 minutes. Would have spent hours crawling attics without it. Anyone else find a tool that just clicked for them?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason2092h agoMost Upvoted

Klein stuff is solid no doubt. But was the bad line an outlet or a splice point you were tracing back to the panel? Asking because I've seen guys swear by toners but still fight with finding breaks in the middle of a run in those old apartment buildings with shared conduits. The real test is how it handles noise from all the other lines packed in there. Curious if yours cut through that clean.

the_jesse1h ago

Grabbed one of those after fighting with a cheap Amazon toner that couldnt handle a junction box with three lines in it. The Klein 500 locked right onto the bad run even with all the other circuits buzzing nearby. I was tracing a buried splice in a shared conduit between units and it cut through the noise like nothing. Took longer to untangle my leads than it did to find the break. Worth every penny just for not having to guess which wire was which.