Honest review: Mel-8704 after three months of actual use

Right, I've had the Mel-8704R for about three months now - picked it up in February for £189 from a supplier down in Bristol - and I think that's long enough to give a proper verdict rather than the usual unboxing excitement talking. Short version: it's decent, but it's not the game-changer the American YouTube lot make it out to be.

I've taken it out to six locations since buying it: twice at a converted mill up near Halifax, once at a private residence in Shropshire (clients wanted the full treatment), the ruins of a chapel outside Dolgellau in Wales, and most recently two sessions at a supposedly active Victorian terrace in Sunderland. In genuinely cold environments the ambient temperature probe is excellent - very responsive, flags drops of half a degree or more reliably. The EMF side is... fine. It picks up the usual interference from dodgy wiring in old buildings, which honestly tells you more about the state of British electrical infrastructure than anything else.

My main gripe is the build quality for the price. The battery compartment cover is already a bit loose, and one of the lads on our team managed to crack the casing slightly just from setting it down on a stone floor. Not exactly rough handling. For nearly two hundred quid I'd expect something that could survive a night on the Yorkshire moors without looking sorry for itself.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's considering one. I'd also be curious whether anyone's compared it directly to the newer TriField TF2 - I've been tempted to grab one of those as a backup unit.

Good write-up, cheers. I had similar issues with the casing on mine - bought it back in October and by December the little rubber gasket around the temperature probe had started peeling. Not a fatal flaw but for that price you expect better. I've started keeping mine in a padded camera insert inside my rucksack, which helps.

The TriField TF2 is genuinely excellent if you're mainly doing EMF work. I've had mine about a year, paid around £145 if I remember right, and it's taken some proper punishment on the Bodmin moors in the rain and kept going. The weighted mode for AC fields is a nice touch - filters out a lot of the noise that makes the cheaper meters go haywire near anything built before 1970.

That said it doesn't have the temperature probe, so if you want that all-in-one readout for clients who like watching a screen, the Mel still wins on presentation.

one of the lads on our team managed to crack the casing slightly just from setting it down on a stone floor

To be fair to the device, stone floors in old buildings are not exactly forgiving. I dropped my first K2 from about two feet onto flagstones at a manor house in Somerset and it looked like it had been through a war. I now carry a little folding camping mat just to put equipment down on. People think I'm mad but nothing's been broken since.

I've always been a bit sceptical of these combined units to be honest. The temperature and EMF functions work on completely different principles and shoving them into one box always feels like a compromise. Our team uses a separate laser thermometer (the Fluke 62 Max, pricey but bombproof) and a dedicated EMF meter, and we've found the readings are just more trustworthy when the instruments aren't sharing circuitry.

Probably overkill for most people and the kit bag gets heavy, I'll admit that.

Does anyone actually use the REM antenna feature or is it just there to look dramatic on camera? Genuinely asking - I've never had a result from it that I couldn't attribute to someone shifting position nearby or a draught coming under a door.

Does anyone actually use the REM antenna feature or is it just there to look dramatic on camera?

Mostly the second one, I suspect. Though I had one session in a farmhouse in Northumberland in March where it triggered repeatedly in a room with no obvious source of interference and no draughts I could detect. Am I saying it was a ghost? No. Am I saying I couldn't explain it? Also no... well, yes. I mean I couldn't explain it. You know what I mean.