I have no experience with them but I'm told that there are smartphone apps which will do this.

From what I’ve seen, cable is threaded through holes drilled in the studs, so you would not hurt the electrical cable. I have hung three TVs and have never had a problem. You can also buy cable management at a big box store to hide any cords and HDMI cables from your newly hung television.

Hit the studs and you won't hit any electrical wires - it's really that simple.

Aren't electrical wires close to them?

If you're hanging the TV odds are very slim of hitting any wires.

Yes, but there aren't that many wires in your wall, and chances of hitting one are close to zero if you're trying to hit studs to hang a TV mount. Diagram

Figure you have 3/8" drywall on 2x4 studs... The electrician would have put any wires halfway back on the stud or further - so your lag screw would have to penetrate the wall 1 5/8" just to reach where a wire might be, and pierce layers of plastic and paper protective sheathing perfectly to cause a problem. And IF there was a problem, the breaker would trip before causing any real harm.

Don’t hit close to the stud, hit the actual stud.

And most of the time the electrical wiring is loose enough it just nudges out of the way.

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If you're mounting above an outlet, then the wires could run along the edge of a stud. In that case, if you hit the electrical, you did a bad job of mounting the TV mount.

Or, they will drill holes through the middle of studs to feed the electrical horizontally. Typically from outlet to outlet (no worries there since you aren't mounting the TV that low). Or from switch to outlet (on the same wall, it would typically go down to outlet level and then horizontal).

So, if you can determine the center of a stud and drill a hole in the center, it's not likely that you're going to hit electrical. Now, there's a chance that a crazy person did something other than stated above (I've experienced it) and hopefully they put a metal plate on the stud so that you can't accidentally drill into it.

It would be above/near plug sockets.

My apartment is like 1950s old. There's lead in the wall paint lol.

Even better! Building materials were bigger then lol
PS - My place is 1920 old :) anyways a fun adventure doing work around here

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There might be wires to the side of the stud, but theres no wires between the stud and the wall, the stud is right up against the wall. As long as you're drilling into the actual stud theres no possibility of hitting wires.

Nail plates are only required if the hole drilled through the stud is closer than 1 1/4" from the face of the stud. So if it's a hole for one wire and it's centered on the stud, there won't be a plate.

Assuming there's no plate, a screw that is shorter than 1 3/4" won't hit the wire, but in this case OP is talking about a wall mount which likely has longer hardware. You'd be very unlucky to catch a wire, but it's not impossible.

Wrong. When wires go perpendicular to studs they go through them, at a depth that wall mount hardware could hit.

It's really not, because wiring (and plumbing and gas) go through the studs as well. It's unlikely they will hit something, but not impossible.

The wire won't run up the wall unless it's running from the breaker to another room above. Even then, the odds are very low. 20yrs of handyman and diy projects has taught me that. I've never hit a wire.

The recep boxes are attached to studs. The stud will be on either side of the recep box. Tap next to the plug and one side will sound solid (stud) while the other will sound hollow and get deeper as you move away from the stud. You may even be able to see the stud by taking off the recep cover of the drywall hole is big enough.

I am a big fan of magnet stud finders. It’s hard to misread the location of the stud with the magnet stuck to a nail or screw in the stud. GL

Get a stud finder with a current detector

I mount tv's for a living. There's no worry of hitting wires as long as you're going into a stud. In fact, where your outlets are are a good indicator of where you have a stud as the boxes are normally attached to one.

You should be more worried about hitting your water pipes, but it's easy enough to avoid those, just don't drill into the wall where there's a bathroom directly behind it.

If you want to ensure that your stud finder is good, get a long thin piece of metal and poke it into your wall (assuming it's not wood panels) and if you get resistance early on, you've got a stud.

If you want to ensure you get it exactly where you want it the first time with no extra holes, mark off exactly where you want the bottom of the TV on the wall. Then measure the heighth of the TV. Place the brackets on the TV, along with the wall bracket and then measure from the bottom of the TV to the top holes of the wall bracket. Use your TV height measurement to ensure the TV is at a good angle (honestly, I see so many people fall in the trap of placing it high up, neglecting that you'll have to crane your neck to watch it.) And then use the "drop" (the bottom of the TV to the wall bracket hole) to mark off where your bracket should go on the appropriate stud

Place the wall bracket on the wall where you come in contact with two studs and drill your holes, and then screw in your lags. And that's the hard stuff done.

Find the left side of the stud, then come from the other side and find the right side of the stud. Then mark the middle. You won’t hit wires stapled to the stud. Wires that are running through the stud in drilled holes should be deep enough that you won’t hit them, or they should have a metal plate over them for protection. The key word here is should

Wish it worked like that all the time. Not everyone uses nail plates, or conforms to code at all, and wires and pipes definitely do go horizontally through studs, so you can never be too sure.

That being said, 99% chance OP will be fine.

Some of us have done this enough to have that 1% chance really fuck our day.

Check if there are any switches or sockets nearby. When in doubt, open them and see where the wires run.

Just for your piece of mind, turn off the breakers for that area. Use your stud finder to find the stud. Again, to be sure, tap a very small nail into the wood to be sure. Then drill. As others pointed out, wires are attached to the side of the stud so as long has you're hitting wood, no worries.

Hit the studs - use a stud finder - essentially impossible to hit a wire. The wires are never between drywall and stud.

Unless it happens to align perfectly, one or both sets of bolts probably aren’t going to be in studs. Look for “toggle bolts” at your local hardware store, they work perfectly for wall mounting a TV into drywall.

This is in the UK, there are guidelines for how wires cross a wall to outlets, over here you can run wires around the “boarders” of a wall, I think you have 150mm to play with from any corner, and then wires crossing out of that border over to an outlet have to come in at 90 degrees, so for any outlet there could be wires going directly up, down, left or right In the wall behind the outlet.

You could take the faceplate off the outlet and have a look what direction the wires are going, but that doesn’t really guarantee anything. Really there’s no easy compromise, you either guess and go slowly, or invest in a tool that that can tell you what’s in the wall

Some stud finders have electrical detection built in. Suss toy local trade shop.

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Very helpful! Thanks for taking the time to comment.