Hi all. I've mounted a couple of things to studs before without an issue.
But I have a little bit more of an elaborate setup. I have a bunch of shelves for my cat that I want to put on the wall. I have a stud/wire detector, but one of the walls I wish to use has voltage detected across a very large area for some reason. And when I put my hand on the wall, it stops ever detecting any wires at all!!
Could there really be that much electrical wiring within this one wall??? There is a singular outlet in this area, but the detector goes off all over the wall, not just above the outlet.
My studs are very far apart at around 24 inches. So only small portions of the shelves will be drilled into the wall and the rest will be seated in the drywall with drywall anchors unfortunately.
How can I work on this project...drilling into both studs and drywall while avoiding the 10,000 wires that are evidently inside of my wall??? And also why do the "wires" all disappear when I touch the wall??
Thanks all lol.
Unfortunately, there's not enough info to help without risk of mistake. Do you live in a single home structure or shared(condo, apartment, duplex, etc.)? What's the age of the structure? Is your breaker panel on either side of the wall you're working on? Is it an exterior or interior wall?
When you say stud/wire detector, what do you actually own? There's no device I know of that combines voltage detection with a stud finder, so I'm guessing your device is a stud finder marketed to also find other buried elements.
If you're working with a traditional stud finder, a lot of things can give off a false positive, like insulation, lath and plaster construction, pipes, a second skin of drywall and even an exceptionally thick coat of compound.
To have the best chance at not messing this up, I would suggest making an inspection hole. You can either purchase a cheap boroscope cam that you connect to your phone or laptop and make small, easily patched holes or a larger hole to insert your phone. If you can remove your baseboard and replace it, you can hide the holes behind the baseboard without having to patch them when you're done.
Depending on the age of the structure, you can often make assumptions on how the wires are run in the cavities but you don't want to risk hitting something important.
I live in a townhouse build in 1998, so many shared walls. The breaker panel is an entirely different area of the home. These are interior walls.
I have this model. Sorry. It detects AC wires, not voltage, per se. It is a Zircon HD55.
https://www.zircon.com/tools/studsensor-hd55/
In most cases, the 'party wall' between two townhouse units is not allowed to carry any services - no wires, pipes, or ducts. The ones I've seen being built lately often have a couple extra sheets of drywall just sitting in the wall between units, presumably as a fire/noise retardant, and that might confuse stud detectors.
You're also not supposed to do stuff to those party walls, at least not without consent from the neighbor, because they are essentially co-owned.
This might be the general 'best practice' today for plumbing, but even as recent as 1998 I wouldn't count on it. It was technically not against code in Canada around 5 years ago as long as the piping was done in fire-rated materials. Also it's pretty much impossible to not have at least some wiring in party walls.