4 Basic Electrical Testers & HOW TO USE THEM

what's going on my friends i'm dustin stelzer with electrician you and today we are going to talk about how to use basic test equipment [Music] so as electricians we have a lot of different testers that we use out there and there's tons of different reasons why we might have one tester over another or have some really really advanced really expensive test equipment versus some you know like cheaper things but there's really four like essential pieces of technology that you're gonna come across most electricians have one or all of these on them or probably a mix of like three of them but these are the main ones that you need to understand so first we're gonna start off with the digital multimeter now the digital multimeter not a lot of people in like construction we'll say are going to be using a digital multimeter digital multimeters are more for testing really precise things if you're going to be putting your tester up on a tabletop and kind of setting it up on a stand and you're going to be sitting in one place and you need to change your readings and and you're going to be testing for one thing and then you're changing something and flipping it over and you're going to be changing the values on the face to be reading different things you might go from like capacitance to voltage to amperage to resistance but really it's meant for like sitting at a desktop and uh staying in one place and getting a bunch of different readings now that's not always the case in like industrial environments and stuff you might see guys that have digital multimeters that are just like uh hung magnetically and that's what they prefer that is their only meter that's the thing that they use everywhere that they go um and they're super die hard about them because they've probably paid like two thousand dollars for that thing um so anyways the digital multimeter uh basically what you're gonna need to know as an apprentice starting out is how to check voltage how to check amperage and how to check resistance with a digital multimeter you'll probably use it for continuity as well so this is how we use it to test voltage [Music] [Applause] [Music] you're going to fold the back out and put the kickstand up set the thing in front of you pull your two leads out take the selector knob turn it to voltage take one lead and go to one thing take another lead and go to another thing so if you're going to test a plug we'll say then you stick one of these in the hot you stick the other one in the neutral and you should get 120 volts now another thing is that's that's a good habit to get into is go from hot to ground as well make sure you've got 120 volts there and then go from neutral to ground and make sure that you have zero volts neutral and ground you should always have zero volts because they should be bonded together back at the electrical service so they should both be at the same potential you don't want there to be a difference of potential like we have with a hot neutral where we have a difference of potential of 120 volts you also since your neutral and your ground are at the same potential you should have the same reading between hot and neutral as you have between hot and ground before we go any further i would like to say thank you so much to my 480 volt members it's because of y'all that support what i do all of the time that i'm able to continue doing what i'm doing so thank you if you haven't joined yet click the little join button and on that note if you're not subscribed bruh why not come on help a guy out hit subscribe hit like hit the little notification bell let you know every time i do a new episode what else that's really all man i'm not asking a whole lot anyways back to the show so let's now move into the tester now a tester is something that you're probably going to use all day every day everywhere you go this is going to be in your back pocket probably more than anything if you do construction if you do service doesn't really matter um i can get almost guarantee like 98 of every electrician out there has some sort of tester or seven of them so this one has a amp clamp on it so uh it's a clamp on am probe or a clamp on ammeter the cool thing about this is that you can put this clamp on ammeter over a really large conductor so if you've got a service panel and you've got like 500 mcm or kc mill depending on where you learned the terminology you can clamp around those big conductors and see how much current is flowing through them whereas most other small testers are just going to have a small jaw that you could put like maybe number two or like maybe one not depending on what brand you're using but you're limited on your size with those so i like having one of these clamp on style and the ability for it to clamp is really cool because you can actually hang it on things so instead of having to hold the meter with one hand and then use the the other probe in the other hand you can actually just clamp it get it out of your hands put it in front of your face and then your hands free you've got both leads in both hands now with amperage usually when you have a clamp-on ammeter you're not going to use the leads to test amperage around a load usually you're just going to get a hold of a wire and put that thing around it you got to make sure if you're going to put a wire in there there's two little lines on the multimeter um so it'll tell you that this line is kind of the optimal place for your wire to go i try not to get it you know out in front it'll still give you readings but it might just it's basing it off of the strength of the expanding and contracting magnetic field around that conductor when current is passing back and forth so you kind of want to line it up right on that line that's the reason they put those lines there [Music] the next tester that you should have is a plug tester and more specifically a gfci plug tester you're going to test an unfathomable can unfathomable can i actually fathom i don't think i can fathom i can't fathom [Music] you're just gonna do a lot of plugs man so throughout your time being an electrician the amount of receptacles that you are going to install take out troubleshoot put new ones in replace is gonna be so much so having a plug tester on you you don't have to get the leads and turn the little dial and get everything set up and and try to plug in and find the right spot just to get a reading no you just take this thing out stick it in you get two little lights boom you're good to go and the cool feature is that it has a bunch of different configurations so it basically lets you know if you wired something backwards if you went hot to neutral or you know like you switched your hot and your ground or you there's a whole bunch of different configurations but you're going to use this all the time now the other really cool thing about them is that if you get the one that has the gfci button on it it will actually simulate a fault condition to ground so it will trip a gfi now if you have a gfci circuit you have probably you know let's say we're in a garage or something like that and we've got a bunch of receptacles all over the place and we've got one gfi device at the very beginning well anywhere on that circuit that you plug this plug tester in you can hit that button and it trips the entire circuit it goes back to that device and trips it so it's really handy a lot of like electrical inspectors or third-party you know home inspectors will carry one around just to make sure that the gfcis work or just you know to see if a receptacle in an area that should have a gfci is actually gfci protected it's pretty clever so you're going to use the crap out of this thing just keep one on you all the time [Music] the next thing is an electrician that you're probably going to run into all the time are tick tracers i don't personally use tick tracers as much as i use all of my other pieces of test equipment um the tick tracer is something more if i've got like a bunch of conductors you know coming out of a junction box and i'm trying to identify which one is on or off i'll have somebody at a panel turning breakers on and off and when this like beeping stops i know oh they just shut it off cool all right turn it back on beeping starts again okay turn it off beeping stops so i know i'm on the same wire that they're on it's more of a tool to just trace down something than it is to tell you whether or not a circuit is dangerous or not for that if you ever think okay the tick tracer just shut off it's telling me that the power is off i'm just going to go ahead and stick my hands on this hot wire or wire i think is off you can still get shocked they're wrong they kind of lie a lot so you have to be very very careful when you're using them anytime i use one i just always pull my tester back out and i verify because i actually have readings that gives me data to know for sure whether or not there's power between one thing and another thing so it's always smart to just double check but it's a good tool to verify if you're ever trying to figure out which breakers are which if you just landed all your home runs you get some that aren't labeled or something like that you're just trying to figure out where things are or if you're in a commercial environment say you're up on a lift you've got like nine hot wires sticking out at you none of them are labeled and you're just trying to trace this one down it's a good way to have somebody that's like in the other side of a the building flipping breakers on and off to be able to tell you which one uh is hot or not so it's just another tool that's kind of got specific purposes but it oftentimes gets abused and people like think um that they can trust it to tell them whether or not power is on or off or is present or not because it's not a good tool for verifying that kind of thing that you really want to be like very sure is truth um and on that note one little tidbit of advice for any of you apprentices even any of you journeyman masters anybody if you're working with somebody i don't care how many years of experience they have and they tell you power is off don't listen to them okay it's the one time that in your entire industry career time doing this that you don't have to listen to your boss that you shouldn't listen to your boss and if you do it's your own damn fault if you get shocked i have been shocked by multiple occurrences of listening to some old fart who's 70 years old 60 of those years he's been an electrician and he's told me yeah that 480 volt circuit up in that pole is off it's okay go ahead and start working on it and you start working on it and boom you get 480 volt just explode in your face and then he looks down he's like oh yeah sorry it was the wrong one people make mistakes so trust people it's fine but don't listen to them when they tell you power is off verify you have multimeters you have four different pieces of test equipment on you at all times to be a true electrician you need to know how to use test equipment to diagnose things to verify take readings find results because that's how we understand this theoretical thing that we deal with called electricity we can't observe it it's invisible you know so like we have to have these pieces of test equipment to kind of gain an understanding of what's happening and that's the only way that we can find problems and you can't learn anything by just listening to somebody say yeah it's off and then just trust them and then like pull into a china cabinet go in and just you know get electrocuted so don't listen to people when they tell you something's off pull your meter out anyways just double check get into that habit you'll thank me later years down the line when you understand after you just shocked your own helper and you feel really bad about it or you feel or are you laughing first because it was kind of funny and then you feel bad about it later if you haven't noticed by now every single one of the meters on this episode say cline on them that is because klein is the sponsor of this episode thank you so much klein for sending me some testers to try out um this little guy has actually kind of become my favorite really just because there's a laser on it like this you know i use this thing everywhere um anytime i'm like lining out a crew of people and i'm in a big commercial building or something i've got like a 20 30 foot ceiling i can sit and be like all right see that conduit see that junction box i need you to run that mcu over that conduit you know like see over there you run this over here like i use this thing like crazy and i used to just keep this like laser distance measure around because it also has a laser um but then i was just using like a measuring tool and it was bulky and it wasn't actually a laser pointer it was actually a measuring tool so it was kind of silly but now that i have this i use it all the time plus it's handy to have on you especially when you're in commercial environments because if you're coming across a whole bunch of different conductors like i was just mentioning before you have your tick tracer on you and it's not just a tick tracer for like you know 120 volt 240 volt stuff it goes all the way up to a thousand volts and there's two different settings on it so you've got the red setting which is anything from 70 volts up to a thousand which is normal you know line voltage you're gonna be using that for plugs and switches and stuff everywhere else but then you've also got the blue option and that's 12 volts and up so it goes twelve to a thousand it'll still do everything in that range but it also goes down to 12 volts so i just love this little thing um this is the coolest tick tracer that i have and it's so cool that i actually do keep it on me all the time where i used to just keep the tick tracer in the truck and like only use it every once in a while this thing is um is that cool so go get you one so anyways that is the four pieces of test equipment that you really need to know as you're getting into this trade um that's how to use them for their basic functions let me know if you guys have any other questions if you want kind of a deep dive in either one um and i can kind of talk about like maybe multiple different uses for each one but that's the gist of them if you guys think that i forgot anything please definitely leave some comments below i love you crazy people and i will see you in the next episode [Music] this can't music and video

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 630,599

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, klein, klein tools, klein testers, how to use tester, how to use tester meter, electrical tester, electrical testing, electrical testers, multimeter basics, multimeter tutorial, multimeter tutorial for beginners, how to test voltage with a multimeter

Id: ZfWDESUEfmA

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021