David French

You work as a designer for a manufacturer of multifunction electrical test meters. For the last few years you've made meters which provide a standalone solution to most of the testing requirements of the 17th Edition of BS7671. Your meters are robust, reliable and easy to use. But you need to sell more meters. So what do you do to differentiate your new products from the rest of the fold?

Infrared thermography has been used for decades by skilled, trained users in a huge range of applications, from structural surveying of buildings through to electromechanical fault diagnosis, from tracking wild animals to clandestine military activities.

Ask any seasoned thermographer and they’ll regale you with tales of expensive, finicky equipment that had to be treated with kid gloves, was bulky and chomped through batteries. It wasn’t long ago that thermographic cameras had their own specialised on-board cooling systems.

As any electrician knows, it’s very straightforward to trace cables… providing you can see them. As soon as they’re buried in walls or under floor spaces, finding cables becomes a laborious combination of educated guesswork, luck and dogged persistence, aided by an insight into whatever was going on in the crazed mind of the person who installed them in such a bizarre topology.

Cable finders such as the Martindale CD1000 and CEM CLS20 claim to put an end to all your cable-finding problems. But do they deliver all they promise? And which should you spend your money on: the CLS20 (currently £119 + VAT), or the CD1000 (£259 + VAT)?