Used a cheap toner instead of my usual one, big mistake on a 200-foot run

I picked the $15 toner from the supply house over my trusty Fluke and spent 3 hours chasing a dead pair that turned out to be a bad connector, has anyone else had a cheap tool totally waste their whole day?

2 comments

2 Comments

mary_schmidt2d ago

Stop blaming the toner. The toner only shows you what the tester tells it. If the connector was bad, your Fluke would have caught it the same way. Cheap toner probably just has weaker signal and worse filtering. That makes it harder to isolate the pair, sure. But the root problem was the bad connector, not the tool. You wasted 3 hours because you trusted the cheap gear too much, not because the Fluke would have saved you.

paulperez2d ago

so you're telling me a $40 toner and a $4000 tester give you the exact same info every time? come on, that's like saying a $20 multimeter catches every intermittent fault a $800 one does. sure, the connector was bad eventually, but the cheap toner probably masked the issue by bleeding signal everywhere, so you couldn't tell which pair was actually dead. the Fluke would've isolated it in 10 minutes flat, not 3 hours.