I did the exact same thing with a $70 one from Home Depot last summer and it beeped at my knee, my phone, and once at a pizza box sitting on the floor. Ended up with a wall that looked like swiss cheese and a wife who was not thrilled about the patch job. The trick that finally worked for me was a cheap neodymium magnet from the craft store, you slide it around and it grabs the drywall screws holding the stud. Just find the screws in a vertical line and you know where the stud is, no batteries, no beeping, no guessing. Cost me like four bucks and it has never lied to me once.

Was team popper all the way, but your burnt ash story sold me.

Did you ever read that study the SCTE put out a few years back about ingress and return path noise? They found the switch to compression dropped water related trouble calls by something like 70 percent, mostly because the seal actually sits right on the jacket instead of biting through it. I remember arguing with an old timer around 2011 who swore the crimp was fine and the tool was the problem, but we both knew that was garbage. The fittings got better and the tools got better at the same time, so it's hard to say which one saved us more grief. What the study didn't cover is how much easier it made training new guys, since a proper compression tool is way harder to screw up than a crimper.