The Best Stud Finder for Home Use

If you’re hanging heavy pictures, mirrors, or shelves, you need to know where your wall studs are—and the best tool we found for the job is the C.H. Hanson 03040 Magnetic Stud Finder. After 30 hours of research and testing against five other magnetic stud finders, we found the C.H. Hanson to be reliable, durable, and accurate, and we also like it because it doesn’t need batteries or any kind of calibration. While the other magnetic stud finders in our test group have only one magnet, the C.H. Hanson has two, which doubles the scanning area and reduces the time it takes to get a hit. It’s also the most durable model we looked at, by far—from what we can tell, breaking it would take some serious effort.