I'm going to hang a TV on the wall of our apartment. The building is quite new (~5 years old) and appears to be built of premade concrete walls/roofing. My cable/metal/pipe detector suggests there is some kind of vertical metal beam in the wall every 20-25cm. This is in an area that isn't above or below a plug socket and I don't think there are any water pipes in this area as it's the far corner of the building, well away from kitchens/bathrooms.

I suspect this is metal reinforcement inside the concrete (aka "rebar") but I thought I'd see if anyone here is familiar with the construction of Swiss apartment buildings. Any clues? I did search the forum/internet quite extensively first but didn't find anything very helpful.

Obviously I could just pay someone else to hang the TV for me but I like to investigate the DIY approach first.

In newer buildings the supporting walls are generally made from reinforced concrete so that is almost certainly what you are detecting.

Jolly good. Thanks!

Besides, 0.5" water pipes to endpoints are not made of metal anymore, it's all plastic.

Exactly, in an appartment of that age there won’t be metal pipe work.

...which also make them impossible to detect with a standard detector! Also worth bearing in mind that those detectors perform particularly badly with cable (rebar is OK although not madly precise).

Radar detectors will see all that but they are rather pricy.

I thought that building regulations specified putting a metal strip over plastic pipework to enable detection?

Even if so, one can only hope that people actually did so

tbh, don't drill in straight lines above/under wall sockets, taps etc (also check the other side of the wall if it is a thin one) and the chance of hitting a pipe is so small that I just hang some cabinets, 2 telly's, 2 consoles and some other small stuff without any detector. Only real old buildings can have the most weird routes for piping since people loved shortcut and shortest routes by then.

Not true at all. When our last place here was being built, I got in after the pipe work had been put in but before the plasterers had visited.

Both water pipes and electrical conduits when all over the place at every angle.

I took loads of photos for future reference for when I needed to put up shelving etc.

Rules & reality on a building site are something else. As built plans can be taken with a pinch of salt as well

When we installed a new kitchen, we need some extra sockets - the electricians made new paths for the cables in the walls. Diagonally...

The rest of the house appears to be sane, however. All done at right angles and parallel to the walls.

Diagonally ? You were lucky. This is during our kitchen renovation. The picture is poor but enough so that I don't bang any nails into the cable trunk.

Attached Images

cable-route.JPG (14.9 KB, 264 views)

That looks like they cut the chase by hammer and chisel.... ouch...