stud finder

  The Best Stud Finders A stud finder is good for, well, finding studs you can’t see. Knowing where those are is crucial so you can be sure to screw into them instead of just the drywall when you’re hanging something heavy, like a mirror or a mount for, say, a flat-screen TV. But some stud finders have other features, too, like deep scanning and AC wire detection.  That doesn’t mean they always do what they’re supposed to. There’s a lot going on in walls, and it can be hard, despite advances in tech, for any device to parse it all and determine what’s a pipe and what’s a wire from outside of the wall. To test all the features, we put a selection of stud finders through their paces on a wall of our own making, as  well as walls in existing homes. For our test, we built a four-by-eight-foot wall out of common materials: wood and metal studs; drywall; copper, black, pex, and PVC pipe; and nonmetallic sheathed cable. Then we scanned the wall with each of the stud finders. All functioned as