Do you have a chicken stick yet? Every homeowner needs a chicken stick:
https://www.fluke.com/en-us/learn/blog/electrical/non-contact-voltage-detector-basics
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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An excuse to buy a tool? Yes please!
And thanks, I hadn't even thought of this. I was going to try and rig up a multi-meter and pray I didn't fry myself.
Like others have said, it’s speaker wires. That’s not what you’d used for electrical wiring. Nothing wrong with being cautious and checking for voltage with a multimeter, but those are most likely speaker wires.
The reason there are probably so many wires is they may have had a stereo receiver located there for patio audio or something similar with a cable box as one of the inputs on the receiver.
You might look into buying a tone and probe kit if you are having trouble locating the wires. A toner runs an audio tone through the wires and the probe wand has a speaker that helps you hear and follow the sound that runs down the wire.
Nice thing about speaker wires since he says he sees speakers still in the house, is you could just connect an audio source and you'll know exactly where that wire ends.
Left most looks like cat5/6 Ethernet cable but hard to tell from pic. If there's multiple tiny, colored wires, solid and a striped, it's that. Next one is RG-59 coax. Others look like speaker wire of some sort but I'd test with a multimeter to be sure they aren't live
Edit: RG-6 to RG-59. Hard to tell from pic though
Thank you all! With a bit of testing, I've confirmed that the gray ones are speaker wires.