Like most folks after waving their wallet profusely at the entrance of Costco, sending clear signal to the door employee that you are a loyal member and ready to spend, I cautiously went in for long stroll at every free sample stands available. It’s a mini all you can eat buffet.
And I promised myself today, I will walk out with less than $200 on the third receipt.
Then this nifty device shows itself out of the blue. A stud finder. Precisely a.k.a ProFinder 6000+.
Most of the times we don’t need a stud finder, but when we do, we really wish it was an accurate one.
I bought several different stud finders from Amazon and Home Depot and they were a-okay at first, but for some reason they just become worse randomly. Maybe they weren’t quality built and the sensor degraded over time. That was over $100 down the drain in total.
So after standing in aisle for what seemed like the entire afternoon, doing extensive CSI-level research based on first impression and active visualization, I decided to take this one home. A $49 stud finder. Well so much for a budgeted, just-buying-the-milk, 15-min trip. Because that $699 Sony alpha camera set also looked pretty good.
Yet half a year later, I think this stud finder is one of the best long-term financial decisions I have ever made, besides the $10K LG OLED Curved TV that crapped itself. Joking aside, the disaster this stud finder prevented from happening already paid for itself in my opinion. I’ll explain more below.
What I Like
- It has a lot of sensors, more than a dozen.
- Wide range. I didn’t care about this feature at first, but turned out it was significantly important in my case.
- No need to calibrate before use.
- Has a pencil holder, has a bubble level, has ruler printed at the top.
- It also uses regular AA batteries. Nobody got time to find them 9V’s. Finally I could stop borrowing the battery from the smoke detector.
What I Hate
- You have to keep pressing the button all the time to keep the detection on. Not so convenient when you have to make use of the bubble level or the ruler.
- Weighs a little more than other stud finders but it’s understandable. I’m just paranoid because whenever I drop something, I always instinctively add an extra kick to the falling object making sure it’s 100% broken by the time it lands.
Story Time
I wanted to extend the electrical outlet to behind the TV in my kid playroom, then close off the lower one. As parents, we don’t want these tiny people to voluntarily testing the voltage by any chance, do we?
The lower electrical box was installed when the house was built, so my best guess was that there is a stud somewhere on the right or left hand side.
I put the stud finder to use and somehow it found two studs, only 3 inches apart which was unusual from the 16-24″ standard. However the new electrical box does not have to be mounted to any stud, so my course of action was to accurately use the narrow empty space between the two studs that the device found.
So I outlined the box using a pencil and a thumb…
…and cut.
Then removed that portion of the drywall.
On the right side, it was truly a wood stud.
On the left, it was my holy shit moment.
Low and behold, a PVC pipe. In fact, it is a PVC drain pipe. I could have cut a hole right there where this pipe is, meaning I’d have to make out another hole on the wall, or at worse puncture the pipe!
If I was to use a regular stud finder where it only showed the location of the stud on the right and I’d just cut out the drywall anywhere on the left, chance is I forced the knife in too deep and cracked open that pipe.
That pipe, well it comes from the bathroom upstairs. It would have been fun for the next few days thus I’m so glad I avoided this disaster literally just by an inch, thanks to this stud finder.
After that little surprise, I was able to snake the wire to the second electrical box and finish up the work. Phew!
And it’s done. Time to clean up. Everybody’s happy. I got the approval from Kim, Zach and Trini, look.
I really enjoy this stud finder so far. It’s accurate and the wide range of detection sometimes helps you avoid digging into the wrong stuff behind the wall. 5/7 would buy again.
It would get a 10/10 rating if it could also detect electrical wiring, but usually this feature is a hit or miss.
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