I thought those new magnetic door lock testers were just a fancy toy

For years, I just used my old multimeter and a piece of wire to check lock circuits, and it worked fine. Then my partner on a job in the new downtown high-rise pulled out this little magnetic field sensor tool. He showed me it could find a weak magnet in a lock from two inches away without even touching the wires. I tried it myself last week on a tricky intermittent fault, and it pinpointed a failing magnet in under five minutes, something that would have taken me an hour to trace. It's a real time saver on those modern MRL units. Has anyone else found a specific job where this tool really proved itself?

2 comments

2 Comments

aaron_gonzalez17d ago

Yeah, that exact thing saved me on a bank of access-controlled storage lockers. The fault was jumping between doors because of a shared power supply issue, and the magnetic tester showed which specific solenoid was drawing current when it shouldn't have been. It cut the troubleshooting time down from a whole afternoon to maybe twenty minutes.

the_sam17d agoMost Upvoted

That's a solid use for a magnetic tester, but isn't it just sensing the magnetic field from the coil, not the current draw itself? Still, same result, you found the bad one fast.