Significant portion of the fire accident is caused by some troubles in electric circuits. To prevent the fire induced by those electric trouble, some indications of electric fire need to be suitably detected at the first stage of the fire development. With this background, the characteristics of soot yielding of electric cables have been investigated using a light extinction method. In this study, a light scattering method was compared with the light extinction method. A slot-type premixed-flame combustor was traversed to bum three types of electric cables by compulsion, then the mass decrease rate and the soot densities were measured. According to the experimental results, the light scattering method is preferred to the light extinction method when the soot yield ratio is relatively small. Thus the former method is more suitable to detect the occurrence of an electric fire in a power distributer box.