Cheapest Multi-meter comparison, Which is the Best Value?

one of the most useful tools in my shop is the multimeter i use it every day i love these things now i have lots of different versions that i have bought over the years for different purposes and they keep getting better and better in this video we're going to compare the multimeters to each other as well as to what i think is probably the most accurate meter that i have in the shop and that's right over here i have a victron smart shunt battery monitor on my entire battery system we're gonna compare all of them and we're gonna open up a brand new one that i just picked up and that's this guy so let's get into it [Music] hi i'm david welcome to my channel where i like to diy renewable energy and energy efficiency projects i've been building this system up diy over the course of years so i've gotten a ton of use out of the simple little multimeter now dmm or digital multimeter comes in handy for all of these projects a quick rundown on what you're looking at behind me this is my off-grid solar system the solar panels are all outside we're looking at the inside components of the battery rack the victron smart shunt which is down here and the inverters this can all power the house and garage off the grid and today i want to show the different multimeters and we're going to test them and compare them to the victron smart shunt the victron battery monitors are known for being extremely accurate and i've been using one for at least three years i used to have a bmv-712 battery monitor which had its own display this particular one is the smart shunt version it's a little bit less expensive to purchase but it doesn't have a display you do have to look it up with your phone since the victron smartshunt is known for being so accurate we're going to compare all of the multimeters to it we're even going to open up a brand new multimeter that i just picked up from a store called harbor freight i don't know if that is available everywhere but at least here in the united states harbor freight is a store that sells tools there's one more meter that i also want to test in this assembly now that's this one i actually have two videos making this and this is the second version and it's a great meter i have it attached right now to this inverter and i use it as a load so that i can load test batteries and see what the capacity is so i really like this simple meter just as a capacity tester when i'm building my batteries this meter was actually the inspiration for this video because i have tested this meter compared to other meters and i found that this is reading amps about seven percent low and that's why i've actually written on here times 1.07 which is what i have to do for my correction factor [Music] now this was one of the first multimeters i ever bought i bought it for less than 20 dollars so it was really cheap the clamp on here can only read alternating current and batteries store electricity and dc or direct current so this clamp cannot read the amps moving in and out through the batteries so i wound up buying this one again it wasn't very expensive but it was really good at the resolution when i was reading one cell at a time i could get three decimal places on here now i bought this one specifically because it had a clamp and i could clamp on and read direct current amps oh finally i it was affordable and i could read dc amps but one of the downsides is that it only goes up to 100 amps and this system if both my inverters are cranking i could be pulling upwards of over 250 amps sometimes as high as 300 amps if these are really doing overtime so this one just didn't cut it for me this was the fourth meter i bought now this one's getting a little bit more expensive now we're up in like 66 dollars something like that this one i bought specifically because it has an inrush feature so i could clamp this on and i could measure the inrush current and i could do the inrush in both ac and dc so for example my miter saw has a high inrush current over 60 amps when you're first starting the miter saw and getting that blade turning this can measure that in alternating current but it also can measure the inrush current on dc for example the golf cart i wanted to make sure that i could supply enough power through the lithium battery to the golf cart motor and get the golf cart turning so i wanted to measure what the inrush current of the motor is for the golf cart so this worked great for that we are all wired up and ready to go again inside here this meter works by reading a shunt like this inside so the current flows through the shunt that's how the meter reads it and it goes up here and i attached it to the copper bar that i have connected to the victron smart shunt and then up here i ran the cable in to this bus bar so we're disconnected for these two big giant cables that go to the abb circuit breaker this is a 300 amp circuit breaker that feeds the two sma inverters which are all that is off right now now the victron smart shunt is also reading voltage and it reads that through one of these little red wires attached right here so we're going to read voltage on this 54.3 volts that should be pretty accurate over here on this display it says 54.3 so let's go ahead and check it with this multimeter 54.32 looks good 54.38 54.32 54.4 54.3 now we're just getting into the devices here and we'll look for the smart shunt it says 54.38 they're all reading between 54.32 and 54.38 with the victron being the highest now what i'm really excited about testing is the amps on the victron we just checked all the voltages we had a range between 54.32 and 54.38 we're going to be looking at the app on the phone we're going to be looking at then three multimeters with clamps so let's turn on the inverter and the space heater and let them warm up now that we've been running a few minutes let's take a look and we're looking at the smart shunt with the app and we have 28 amps and if we look down here 27.6 amps so you see that's why this one is reading low and i have to add seven percent trying to catch these at the same time okay and then compared to this one this one's reading a little bit high this one looks like it's reading the highest of all of them and then this one is lower 28.4 so as we can see here this one is very very close so this unity which is one of the cheapest ones out there it's actually reading the amps really close to what the viktron is reading that's awesome all right so this one looks great yeah so this one is definitely reading amps higher than the victron shunt so even this one is reading high compared to the victron shunt this is definitely the most accurate for clamping on so the unity this big fat cable right here is a four odd so let me show you that this unity will fit around the four rot but it's tight see that's as wide as the those jaws go and you squeeze around there and make sure it's latched in the back and it's touching on both sides so it will do it but it is a close fit the uni-t is the most accurate clamp-on meter of all the meters that i have now i'm really surprised by that because this was the least expensive clamp-on meter that i have for measuring amps so i will leave a link to this one or if this one is no longer available the closest unity model that i can find that might replace this model because this is an old model at this point it might not be available anymore inside this little electric box that i have is a little metal shunt and this little shunt has a notch in it and that's the calibration process now we just saw that it is reading lower in amps which means there's less resistance going across here than there should be so it's been suggested to me that if i nibble away a little bit of the metal i can increase the resistance of the shunt which should represent a higher amp on the meter and get us more accurate so inside the case we can see that little shunt down in there i just used this carbide cutting tip and you can see we increased the amps a little bit a little bit closer because i nibbled just a hair right there i got in at an angle and nibbled away just a tiny bit so we're getting closer it says 28.3 this says 27.8 so let me get in there again and do a little bit more so there's that little nibble mark that i made and now let's compare what the difference is at this point so i think we're getting closer just a little bit more i mean i went really slow just nibbling away a little bit at a time 28.5 over there 38.5 i think we did it using this little rotary cut-off tool i was able to cut a little notch in that shunt and get my meter more accurate now i know that when i measure the capacity of the batteries it will be accurate right on the screen and we don't have to do anything else well i hope everybody enjoyed the video it did take a long time to set up and do all the testing of the different meters even though i know it looks really quick on camera but this is something i've wanted to do for a really long time and i'm glad i finally got around to doing it so i hope you enjoyed i hope you like it subscribe and comment down below if you thought of anything else that i should be testing in the future thank you you

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 59,759

Keywords: Victron Smart Shunt 500, shunt, calibrate, amps, DC, AC, Battery, meter, Victron, smartshunt, Best, multi meter, multi-meter, testing, comparison, DMM, digital multi-meter, clamp, direct current, value, cheap, cheapest, accurate, 500a

Id: fCRJ8XdPrn4

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021