Finding the Right Guys Used to Be Torture Until I Spent $12 on StudPop.
When it comes to DIY projects, my enthusiasm and willingness to tackle them has always compensated for a certain lack of what some would call “craftsmanship”—I’m the type who needs to cut twice, no matter how many times I measure. Finding studs in a wall is a perfect example: it should be the easiest part of any project, but fancy digital stud finders have always let me down—in fact, the more fancy they are, the less useful I find them.
That’s why the StudPop is so great. It’s an incredibly simple and incredibly cheap stud detector. It made finding studs in my walls so easy that I threw all those digital stud detectors in the trash.
StudPop uses powerful magnets to locate frame studs.
Using expensive, sophisticated stud detectors always caused confusion—they’d always light up immediately after I passed a screw, or mysteriously indicate there were no studs in my house at all. StudPop forgoes all those bells and whistles and uses a simple system: a powerful magnet attached to a plastic indicator. I’ve had magnetic stud detectors before, but their magnets were usually quite weak, and they were just as inconvenient as sophisticated electronic detectors, as they produced a lot of false alarms.
Unlike metal studs, the StudPop is so powerful that it sticks to the wall when it comes into contact with metal. This makes it easy to detect studs in a wall. Move the StudPop along the wall in an S-shaped pattern until an indicator appears (you’ll feel it when it hits something—the magnet is quite strong). Once you’ve located one spot, move the StudPop vertically downward in the same S-shaped pattern until you reach the second spot. This way, you’ll know you’ve found a stud, not a protective plate or wire—three hits along the same vertical line means you’ve found a stud.
The whole process takes about a minute, and (in my experience) there aren’t a single false alarms. The fact that it locks securely into place when stuck in a nail or screw is simply amazing, freeing up your hands, and the simple plastic indicator is easy to read—either the tool is upright or not. Tools are easier to use than this one: no batteries to replace or charge, no need to read the instructions, and it’s so compact, so it doesn’t take up valuable storage space. Since I got it, I haven’t drilled into any empty spaces.