I Built a See Through Wall to REALLY Test StudFinders

i built this see-through wall with all different kinds of studs pipes wires as well as five different wall types so that we can see which stud finders actually see behind the wall so in the wall behind me here we have a whole slew of different kinds of wires and pipes as far as the wall itself up top we have 18 inches of 5 8 inch thick drywall followed by half inch thick drywall half inch drywall covered with half inch shiplap inch and a half thick drywall on the bottom we have lath and plaster so i built a lathe and plaster wall here so that you can actually see exactly how this will work with these different stud finders and cannot find the studs through there especially since the lath itself is a bunch of strips of wood so we'll see how it goes we're going to get started with this little magnet pal magnet it's just a small strong magnet and all this is for is just finding the screws that are in the drywall that attach the drywall to the studs now there are some pros and cons to using this namely if the screws are off to the side of a stud or worse yet if they're not even touching it and they're left in there then you might think that there's a stud there when there's not another one is you have to spend time doing this trying to find those screws oh okay yep i grabbed one there so we've got a screw right there and so we know there should be a stud there we just don't know where on the actual surface of the stud it is now once you find one easiest thing to do is just to go back and forth got nothing there there's another one there okay now i happen to know that this is a double stud here but you wouldn't know that without having seen this be built or without this x-ray vision here okay nope i didn't get one right there okay so this would be really confusing if you didn't know there was a double stud there and you're getting some here and some there so that's a tricky part oh and this is another cool thing with these so i found that but look at this this metal stud it's almost grabbing it by itself this whole way yeah right there so it can kind of tell the difference especially here where this is half inch thick it can tell the difference between wood and metal because it's got that it's got a pole right here and it will stick to it on this half inch stuff at least anywhere on the stud moving down here to the ship lap i don't know if it's gonna okay it's probably gonna pick up our brads um because i used brad's and put those into the studs so i'm pretty sure that's what it's grabbing right there in fact if i yep there's one there and i'll probably find yep one there that's fine for something like this if you've got some brads that are on the stud but if someone missed the stud again these magnets are just going to go to wherever those brads are now hypothetically at least this magnet should work just fine on this uh inch and a half drywall because i have long drywall screws holding everything in here so it should be able to find something right there okay so if i go up and down on this plane and there's the other one okay now down here on the lath and plaster i'm curious if it can pick out the nails which are all on the studs here i'm going to scan along see what i see nothing there and there are nails on every single piece of lath on each stud so this magnet is pretty useless on here now you may have seen on my channel i've showed off these little devices this is called the stud pop and this gives you both an audio and a visual cue when it finds something so again it's just magnet based so let's come over here and we'll work on this stud see if we can find a screw here it's got a little bit of wider area so you don't have to cover or make as many passes hopefully that's not finding anything yet there we go okay so there's a screw there and you can see visually the little center piece pops up and then it makes a little sound too if i move up through the 5 8 inch thick stuff should have no problem with that there we go there's one there and one there and one thing i like that they did on the stud pop is that the diameter of that stud pop is an inch and a half which is the typical diameter or width of a two by four again i want to check this okay yeah there's our metal look at this okay so we get a little visual indication all the way up so if we move off the metal stud it goes down and there it goes up so that's pretty easy way to see if you've got metal studs versus wooden studs so i can find that pop pop pop basically with all of our magnetic devices we're going to have the same issues where it's going to find the brads only might not be very accurate at all when it comes to finding studs especially if the person installing the paneling didn't actually get the studs it's just going to find where the brads are and that could be a bad thing let's see how our stud pop does trying to find oh there's one there okay there's a nail or a screw somewhere let's go along this plan yeah there we go okay so same thing as before as long as your screws are actually on a stud it's going to find those just fine let's try on the lath and plaster i'm curious to see if it can pick out the the nails seeing a look there's a little movement right there okay so this one actually is yeah look at that this works way better than a traditional magnet on finding these little nails let's move over to this side look at that that's impressive good i'm gonna try the zircon hd55 and this is basically the cheapo stud finder that you find at home depot or lowe's for about 20 bucks okay it's blinking back and forth with the ac metering here nothing nothing nothing still nothing what is this i don't even know what it's doing right now okay i'm gonna try it again it kind of missed that stud though okay start it over okay stud look at this okay it's coming close to going red and it's finding what i'm suspecting is the gas pipe there it's almost showing it like it's a stud which is pretty scary and stuck over here so different results let's try the 5 8 inch thick i can barely see the screen here okay stud again showing the ac shows a stud there this is probably the best this thing is done to be honest with you usually i get very inconsistent results with it stud there over to here that seemed really long okay i think it may have uh read a little much on that one and then over to our edge okay i did this earlier today on this wall and it found the gas pipe it went off as if that were a stud that you should drill into so that can be kind of scary wow very good so this did a great job on that let's see if it can do anything on latham plaster okay stud oh look at that i'm impressed oh kind of no that's yeah oh yeah there it's struggling okay not the best performance but better than i expected especially for our little twenty dollar zircon here and we're good okay stud finders are working let's test them out next we're gonna try one of the nicer zircons this is the a250c multi scanner it's got four different settings it's got your stud scan a deep scan it's got an ac scan and a metal scan so hopefully it can find a lot of the stuff in the wall here these ones are about sixty four dollars at the time i purchased this and let's see how it does so i'm going to put it on to the stud scan mode again we'll start with our half inch drywall okay we're blinking already right here saying that there's some electricity running through there now just fyi my wall here is actually green this is just a green screen thing i've got running here and this screen is also almost the same shade so that's why it might look a little funky here okay so it says right here let's see let's try this again so it detects something it says edge right there center right there and the other edge right here or it did right there edge okay so you can kind of compare this with the x-ray here to see how that looks okay it found something here so again this should be our wires and pipes but it's kind of picking that up almost like it's a stud okay oh man okay so we've got that so it's turning red okay that might mean it thinks it's metal again showing electricity all throughout there even though there isn't any let's look at the up here on the 5 8 inch yeah this is all over center okay that's not the center don't drill there yikes wow okay this is what scares me about stud finders if you use this and you go off of what we just looked at you're going to be drilling into ductwork you're going to be drilling into gas pipes you're going to be drilling into electrical wires and probably a couple of studs too but this was all over the place that is scary to me man that's why you got to check things multiple times because you never know how accurate these things are we'll talk about some tips to make sure you know what's behind the wall without having to rip the drywall off but that's scary all right let's move it down here to the ship lap and see how it does okay we're blinking and red and green all over this thing is struggling i'm getting this beeping everywhere i go okay center and it's confused by the double studs maybe a stud same there yeah okay not doing so well on the ship lap that's for sure okay center not okay it's not sure it's not sure on that one at all what is this okay i think there's a stud there yeah it's not doing too good oh look thinks there's a stud there so really struggling on the latham plaster for the zircon a250c now just a little bonus tip here i've found that a thermal camera is actually a pretty great stud finder honestly it just depends on the wall but if you've got either outside temperatures on one side or you've got for example your attic access those walls that are up along your attic and sometimes even in your basement around the outside this can actually do a really good job so here's a perfect example of exactly that i can see that there are vertical studs going up there's a top plate and then there's this triangle structure that's holding up the roof area and that actually has a totally different pattern of where the studs are located so at a quick glance this thermal scanner shows me that those studs are a little bit colder just by a couple of degrees but enough that it shows up on here now a thermal scanner like this or a thermal camera tends to cost they start at about a hundred and forty dollars for a little add-on for your phone for example and they get pretty pricey this one is about four 400 for example but you can get less expensive ones and they're handy for a million things so just something to keep in mind next up i've got a fun one this is the metallic scanner 40 from zircon and this one is just for metal it doesn't claim to be a stud finder but i think it's pretty cool you can actually find non-ferrous metals so things that are not magnetic with this and i bought this specifically to test out with our lath and plaster which we'll get to in just a moment by the way doesn't this look like one of those star trek health scanner things do you guys remember that like they you know beam it over your body to see what's wrong with you and see if they can heal your skin anyways it looks like some weird futuristic sci-fi device but let's give it a try let's try this out on our lath and plaster and it should there we go should pick up our nails we're getting mixed it's it's reading high but it's not really picking them up down here so if you're if you're looking at this right here there's nothing right here it goes up to three and by here it goes to nothing so you would kind of be able to tell that you've got maybe and it's all the way up and down so you'd be able to tell that you maybe got a stud there let's move to our next one right there okay didn't quite go off but same thing you got and there's one found some metal metal there yeah it's not picking up as much as i'd expected so i was kind of thinking this might be perfect for a latham plaster but it it helps it detects it but honestly some of our other stud finders did a much better job with that uh than this one that one's pretty good apparently likes my belly more than my chest makes sense next up is the franklin and i will forewarn you this one's going to show up a little funky as well this is a green franklin sensor and i've got it on my green painted green screen wall here so if it disappears or you just see little dots that's why forgive me on that one my favorite feature simple as it is is there's a pencil inside here so when you're marking your studs it's nice if you've got the pencil right in your stud finder i think duh that kind of makes sense so these guys run usually about 50 or so you can find some less expensive ones in the 30 to 40 dollar range also by franklin but let's see how it works so half inch drywall here if we come over here push the button hold it down so it detects a stud over there but look it's seeing something in here and it thinks it's a stud so we're getting false positives already okay we've got our stud here it's the double stud okay that went a little nuts look at this it thinks everything's a stud all right so it does okay at some points but we got a little crazy now what is this i don't even know what it's doing blinking all over what is that look at this look at that oh look at that false positives again okay there's our metal stud finder no problem or a metal stud no problem with that but look it thinks there's a stud there too don't drill there and another one yeah see too scary these things are wrong and so that's what i'm finding with a lot of these stud finders is they falsely identify a lot of items in your wall as studs in your wall which is bad news again we're getting false positives right away all right so it's got the double studs that's great that's actually doing really well there okay found that stud okay metal st oh metal stud kind of putting it a lot thicker than it is look at that that could be problematic okay let's check out the latham plaster very curious to see what this picks up everything still everything okay yeah lots of lots of false positives here blowing up so this is really not going to do much for you for laughing plaster or four inch and a half drywall now if you really need to be sure of what's in your wall one of the best ways is just to look usually you don't have the option to rip off the drywall to see or that's not practical for what you need it for but you can use something like this this is an endoscope and it's got a teeny tiny little camera right here it's got led lights on the end that are adjustable in their intensity and they're really convenient you can just drill a teeny tiny little hole into your wall and then you can look back there and see what wires you have what studs you have what pipes there are all of that so if you need to be 100 sure this is one of the better ways to do it but it does require a little patchwork afterward now you can pick up an endoscope for as little as about 50 bucks online they're not too bad they get quite a bit more expensive just like the thermal cameras one like this for example is typically around 150 or 200 dollars not really practical for all circumstances but for certain things again this can be a really handy way and that way you know for sure now next up i'm going to show the wallabot diy 2. now in a previous video i did comparing some stud finders i used the original wallabot diy that one only works with android and i'm an iphone guy and so i wanted to test test this out i bought one of these and they're a little pricey i think this was 160 if i'm not mistaken so the most expensive one of the whole lot here and this one does work with ios or android and it uses a wi-fi hotspot to do that so it takes a minute to get it set up you can't just put this on the wall and go you have to connect your phone to the wi-fi hotspot that this makes and then we've got to calibrate this so i'm going to do the calibration now i'll show you what that looks like the nice thing is you can hold this separately so i can hold this in one hand and calibrate this and use this on the other so this usually takes about 15 seconds okay and then we're on okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna start over here so it doesn't find my edge stud a lot of these are not finding that one struggles okay so it's got a pipe or a wire there's my pecs let's see if it can find the pvc okay there's the pvc good then we're going to move over here and it should find our double studs here okay so wooden stud so it says wooden stud right there and wooden stud right there so it has a hard time kind of distinguishing the two but it does show each of them so there's one and then as i move over there's the other one so it does a good job with that oh so okay something piper wire but i had to kind of search for it and look it's showing it sideways even though it's not sideways right there let's come up to where it is sideways i thought see that it said right there wooden stud a lot of them are struggling with the joint from the half inch to the 5 8 inch drywall okay there's piper wire there that's that's a wire so that's correct and pipe or wire there as well we can kind of follow it down and see if it finds our stud here okay wooden stud good so next up we have a vertical electrical wire good so there's that and then we should have our pipe there's our half-inch copper pipe and then we've got our big pipe so it's struggling with that see it didn't really show it our pvc it kind of gives little ghost blips of it but it's not really showing it and then we'll have okay look at that metal stud metal stud right there so it identifies metal versus wood so that's good now it should be showing our gas pipe there's our gas pipe let's see if it picks up the four inch duct yep says another pipe there and it doesn't say what it is or how big it is but it just shows a pipe or a wire okay oh and there's our end stud so did pretty good on the half inch and it found basically everything that was back there a couple of areas where it didn't do as hot but generally this has found the most and been the most accurate so far all right coming down here on the ship lap let's see what we see okay we got a wire there a pipe it's not finding the other pipe come across there's our stud and another stud pipe or wire [Music] piper wire there okay we got a stud here does a good job with that now again we're behind an inch of material here so that's why it's kind of curious to see how these things do pipe or wire there piper wire there all right interesting pipe or wire it doesn't know there's a stud there it's detecting the metal stud as a pipe or wire so that's not very helpful piper wire there's our gas pipe and then see if it finds the duct yep and there's the duct okay so it did okay but it did mess up pretty bad on one of the things which was the metal stud so interesting results with the wallabot on the ship lap now i've got links to all of these products in the description below if you want to check that out those are affiliate links which helps me out a little bit and it doesn't cost you any more also if you want to learn a little bit more about how to patch holes in your drywall whether it's a little small hole like this or a big old hole i've got a video right here you can check out on how to patch five different holes five different ways for drywall thanks for watching i'm nils and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: LRN2DIY

Views: 903,427

Keywords:

Id: aQPD0Kp96Dc

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022