F02 Underground Cable Locator, Wire Tracer with Earphone, Cable Tester for Dog Fence Cables Irrigation Control Wires

I was skeptical but had a broken dog fence wire. We have about 400' of underground of underground 10 gauge wire and had to try something. I ordered this and watch many you tube videos as well. With fence unplugged, I disconnected the 2 wires from the fence controller and hook on the red and black clips to those. I traced the wire around the whole yard twice and found one area about 10' long where the signal went dead. That took about 20 mins. Marked it with flags, Then I dug in this area, found the wire and found the break within about 3' of where I started digging. Literally took me about 10 mins. Total success!!. I would have never thought this product would solve my problem in 30 mins. A clear winner in my book.

I bought this while trying to find where the heck my 6 sprinkler valves were buried. I had owned my home for 4 years and had never seen the boxes, this tool was worth every penny and helped me locate all 6 valves that were totally buried in two separate locations. Had it not been for this, I would have been digging for some time to trace the wiring.As others have said, make sure your connections are solid and you ground it.

I bought this to hunt a break in an invisible dog fence. While it generates signal, it is not a true break-detector.For those considering buying this instead of calling your installer, follow some troubleshooting steps before doing either:- Identify anything in your yard that has changed:Did you put in new trees or plants near your line? See if your digging cut the line there.Did your get lawn aerated or plugged? This is harder to hunt, but check for above ground breaks visible through the plugs.- If you’ve spliced breaks before, check those junctions:Water ingress from loose soil can occasionally interrupt the signal and may need to be reconnected.If your stripped wire lengths are too long, sometimes the wire connectors don’t maintain a solid connection, come apart, and need to be redone. This is especially problematic in areas where you’ve moved the wire to accommodate planting near an existing splice, as there’s not a lot of slack in these lines underground.- Check your wiring at the house junction:These are simple systems but sometimes the connections where the line starts/terminates can interrupt the circuit over time if they weren’t installed with a solid contact tightly. Make sure the bare wire is still connected at the source and the nuts/connections holding them are tight.If you do end up using this for dog fence break detection, you can make it more efficient by disconnecting one side at the wall termination and connecting to one side at a time with the ground for the signal generator on the ground wire. This will let you follow the signal until it disappears and then slowly work back to where it starts to have a rough idea of where to dig.Overall, it works for what it is, but having a repeatable process for using will save time and headache before either buying this or calling the installer company.

I got tired of paying the company that installed our underground dog fence more than $100 each time the fence stopped working. After watching them a couple times, I figured this was something I could do for myself. So I ordered this tool and some wire and connectors. The manual was close to useless, so I watched some YouTube videos and figured out how it worked. I tested the transmitter with a short loop and bypassed the surge protector to make sure they weren't the problem. Then I hooked this up with one line grounded. The tester picked up the ground line and the line out of the house perfectly. But no less than 5 feet from where the wire left the house, I started losing the signal. The twisted wires are not even burried for the first 15 feet, so there is no question where the wire is. The detector was picking up the wire, but the signal got very weak. I know where the wire is, so I went around the yard trying to pick up a signal. There are places where the wire is exposed, and I could definitely pick it up there. In most places where the wire is burried, though, I got no signal at all. However, in a few places, I was able to get a signal. The wire is never more than 6" deep, so the unit should pick up the signal everywhere, given it's rating to 2.5 feet. Right now, I'm charging both units overnight to see if that improves performance. If it doesn't I'm sending it back.