GRM home phone circuit testing?

My home phone stopped working. Phone company that owns the lines states that the service to the house is ok. Which should mean that there is a problem inside the house. Anyone know of a cheap tester for testing this? When you call the house you get a busy signal. When you pick up a phone in the house you get no dial tone with some static. There is no phone left off the hook anywhere. I have gone as far as unplugging both phones in the house and plugging a hardwired phone into a jack. No change.

You have a land line

take an handset outside. there is a service check jack where the phone co comes inside.

You have a short somewhere. If you check outside with a handset, you will probably still get the same response. But if you disconnect the lines that feed into the house, you will probably clear the line. If you have multiple feeds in from there, use a VOM and meter each one separately. You will probably find one has a short or low resistance. Do this with the inside phones disconnected. Once you find the shorted line, reconnect the other feeds and see which phones work. The one that does not, check all connection points. Somewhere wires are rubbing.

Grtechguy wrote: You have a land line

Sure. When the power goes out, I have a phone.

CWH beat me to it.

I will add that a line tracker like this makes tracking down the issue a lot faster. It's a cheap tool, but I've used mine just like that one for 3 years tracing and testing network cabling.

noddaz wrote:

Grtechguy wrote: You have a land line

Sure. When the power goes out, I have a phone.

It's called car charger. Or 'bring your charger to work' day.

I just didn't expect a civilian to have a toner. I still have mine. After way too many years of ringing out cables.

I'll just leave this here.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/FCC-Prepares-to-Set-Rules-for-the-Death-of-Copper-POTS-126725

Do you have a security system in the house that dials out in the event of an alarm? They 'sieze' the line when they call out, and if they're malfunctioning they sometimes won't let it go.

Back in the day (70's through late 80's) we would run our high security alarm signals through dedicated copper lines, one pair from premise to central station. That got harder to get and monstrously more expensive, as even back then they were moving away from copper. I would imagine a request for that service now would only get a confused silence.

If you have an alarm connected to your line, there is SUPPOSED to be an RJ-31 jack that can be unplugged to disconnect the panel from the line. Not all installers use them though.

It's two copper wires, easily traced and figured. Just start where the lines come into the house. You'll almost certainly find a junction box there. You can follow the lines then to the various jacks.

When you've got it understood, disconnect them all and then reconnect one at a time. Each time, check the sound and such. When you connect one and it all goes to heck, that's the problem line.

Problem is likely in a wall jack itself. Quite likely that a little pin wire that makes the connection has broken and is crossed over to another.

I had a similar issue about two years ago. I have more phone jacks in my house than I can count and about 3/4 of them dropped out. It turns out that the one outdoor jack that I have was the culprit. Once I disconnected that one, everything else came back.

So...if you happen to have an outdoor phone jack, I'd suggest that you start there.

They make a cheap jack tester that plugs into the jack. A cheaper way is to take a wired handset (since you mention no power I assume you have one) and plug it into the test jack on the customer side or your demarc. Unplug the wire in the jack (that is connected to your house wiring) plug in your handset and see if it works. That will rule out problems on the phone companies side. If that is ok, then unplug everything that is connected to the jacks inside and test them. If you just have one that doesn't work, then it is either wiring or the jack itself. I've seen the biscuit jacks go bad before. 9/10 times your jacks are daisy chained so there could be a break between two jacks.