I have a simple pencil A/C detector for figuring out if a wire is hot in the home that works great. Last night I was using it to determine which bulb was out on a string of Christmas lights and it worked like a champ, but it appears the line has to be running at 120Vac.
My question is does anyone know how to make one of these detectors, and is it possible to modify it to test ~24Vac (modifying the 120Vac home unit is fine as well). I have a Christmas display with 10 bulb sections of lights running at 24Vac that are a pain to debug when a light goes out (it seems like the internal shunt doesn't blow right when running at this voltage, so the whole set of 10 just goes dark. I tried my pencil tester, but it wouldn't work (even when I adjusted the sensitivity on it). Any thoughts??
~Jason
My question is does anyone know how to make one of these detectors, and is it possible to modify it to test ~24Vac (modifying the 120Vac home unit is fine as well). I have a Christmas display with 10 bulb sections of lights running at 24Vac that are a pain to debug when a light goes out (it seems like the internal shunt doesn't blow right when running at this voltage, so the whole set of 10 just goes dark. I tried my pencil tester, but it wouldn't work (even when I adjusted the sensitivity on it). Any thoughts??
~Jason
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