Power Gear Receptacle Tester, Standard 3-Wire, Circuit Analyzer, 110-125 VAC, 6 Visual LED Tests, ETL Listed – 50542 Gray

I love this! It is so much easier than a multimeter if you don't need all the bells and whistles. You just plug it in and it tells you what's going on with your outlet! It's very small as you can see, it fits in the palm of my hand and I am a very petite woman. I like that it is so small because I can take it with me because I use it for my earthing mat to make sure that the outlet is properly grounded. Since I used the grounding mat in other places besides my home. I can just stick this in the Box of the groundy map and take it with me to ensure that wherever I go. I can check the outlet! Thank you for this tool! It is extremely easy, inexpensive and works great!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Used this to inspect the outlets on a new construction and was very pleased with the response and ease of use. A handy instrument to have whether you're an electrician or not.

I already knew I had some electrical issues to deal with at home, and with this tool, it makes it really easy to determine what is wrong, and how to fix it. My primary problem is that the idiot who I bought this house from, when he finished the basement himself, he cut off almost all the ground wires from the receptacles. I had no clue until I bought a battery backup system for my computers, and the sucker would not work because it detected no ground. I then brought in an electrician who fixed the problems in my "man cave", and added a brand new dedicated circuit in addition, as well as put in my coax for my internet connection. He also fixed the bathroom outlet as that was the most dangerous not to be grounded. But, I wanted to do the rest of the outlets, and as I bought all new plugs with built in ground fault detection, I am doing two birds with one stone. With this device, I can not only detect the problem circuits, but when I switch them off at the box, I can make sure I turned off the one I need to work on. Oh, I got one surprise when I checked all the upstairs wiring... one had the hot and neutral flipped. Nice to be able to find such issues easily.

This is a simple tool that immediately diagnosed a problem with my outlet. You plug it in and it lights up. Then you compare the lights to the onboard lighting chart. By lighting up, it will also show if an outlet has power or not, but I would still check with a multimeter. It was not expensive and worked exactly as promised. Every homeowner should probably have one of these if you do any electrical work. I would recommend this to anyone.

I was replacing an old ungrounded two prong receptacle in my apartment that went to my fridge, I kept the wires in the same orientation and checked with a multi-meter to check hot to ground, it turns out the hot and neutral were reversed and I had to power off the circuit again to redo the wiring. I always wanted to get one of these devices, small, affordable, and saves time. I wouldn't have had to redo the wiring if I had this device. As soon as I got the tester I went back to that outlet and confirmed everything was correct then ran across my apartment and checked all the outlets making sure they were all good. A few had the same problem, reverse hot and neutral, a few ungrounded, but most were fine and grounded. It helps to have a short extension cable while using this in tight spots where you can't plug the device straight in and be able to see the three leds.

I haven't found any bad wiring but it I did check the outlets in my house to see if they are wired correctly and so far I haven't found any. I did have a spike protecter claim there is a wiring fault but the GE 50542 and another tester indicates there isn't any ground faults. I can't comment on the effectiveness since I haven't encountered any incorrectly wired outlets which was surprising with the former owner of the house who probably did the wiring as well as connecting gas lines with the stove where he used Teflon strips you use for water pipes to stop natural gas from leaking. We smelled gas and a gas line worker quickly found out Teflon was used. There were some outlets that needed to be fixed in the home inspection so this was good to see if there are any more outlets that are bad since the inspector was limited to outlets that weren't obstructed by furniture and he obviously missed the gas lines being sealed with Teflon that is good for water but not Natural Gas!

I've been having back feed issues with our cable, about 30 volts AC with other devices plugged in the same outlet and this is the right device to test it with, the only issue is that is has to be grounded to test for swapped hot/neutral wires, so if you have an old house without the ground, it will just say "open ground", until you use a ground from a properly wired outlet and then it will finally show if the outlet is correct or not. In my case we had like 5 outlets that showed as open ground, but I put a ground with to this device and it showed red and the middle yellow, which means hot/neutral swapped. Bingo, that must be the source back feed, I just wish I had realized this earlier and now it will have to be corrected. But button line is this little device is very hand to have! It feels a bit cheap, but does the job well, and the price is good, so I can't fault it.

I purchased this electrical installation problem detector to check one receptacle.This was a busy receptacle, where the plugs were going in and out at more than any other receptacle. The problem this receptacle had was when the plug was inserted in the receptacle it arced big time. With the detector in hand, sometimes it showed there was no connection problem and other times it showed the receptacle had a defect. The fact the detector sometimes showed there was a problem, that was good enough for me. I tore open the receptacle and found the hot wire and the neutral wire were stabbed in back of the receptacle and both were loose. So I disconnected all the wires, and reinstalled them using the brass and silver screws and tightened them fairly good. That fixed the problem. My thanks go the electrical detector.