How To Use A Multimeter - USING THE FLUKE T5-600 TESTER

what's going on everyone i am dustin Stelzer and this is electrician you today we are going to talk about how to use a basic multimeter [Music] [Music] so I want to give a special shout out to Rogers electric for sponsoring this video for this you don't know Rodgers electric is a electrical contracting company that's based out of Atlanta Georgia they've got texts all over the US so they're a nationwide company they're trying to create some really good training stuff for their company and create a whole training platform so they're gonna be sponsoring a lot of these videos going forward so if you have any questions or you want to check out know a little bit more about their company there's a link in the description below so really quick one thing I need to talk about is this is not technically a multimeter for all intents and purposes all of us on the field call this a multimeter but it's really not a multimeter fluke calls this a tester if you're gonna go to flukes website and look up multimeter something like this is going to pop up so this is technically a multimeter for all you know Google search purposes you're gonna find this when that pops up you go look for a tester you're gonna find this but again we all call this a multimeter so for this video I'm just gonna keep calling this a multimeter so what is a multimeter well I mean it's a multiple use meter it does multiple things so for example this meter has voltage amperage and resistance those are the three things it does continuity as well so technically there's four different functions to it but it's a very simple multimeter and this thing is probably I don't know it's bold to say but probably one of the most used testers on the market because it's just durable as hell it's very reliable ergonomically it's put together really well and it's simple there's not a whole bunch of you know like separate little dials and you got to make sure that you're on the right dial you got to make sure you're on DC and not AC this thing Auto detects whether it's DC or AC there's really only three options you got voltage amperage and resistance and that's it so this is liked by a lot of people so how do you use it the first setting we're gonna talk about is voltage now voltage is easy 120 volts 240 volt 480 volts you've all heard things like this this is a 600 volt meter which means you can only test it on voltage systems up to 600 volts it's not tested for anything beyond that so if this thing blows up in your face because you're using it on like a 3000 volt system you're being you've been warned it's it's on the label it is 85 - 600 so 600 volt maximum it does amperage so amperage you're testing on one wire how much current is going through a wire and you use this little divot inside of here and there's a line on it there's a line here and a line here and as long as you just line your wire up with that line it'll read how much current is going through it and the third thing is resistance so the little ohms symbol is going to show you resistance values if you were to test a wire and see between this point and that point how much resistance is there to the current like basically how much traffic is there in the car I'm driving and the last thing is continuity so continuity is also on the resistance setting it looks like there's this tiny little Wi-Fi logo right next to it it's not Wi-Fi it just means audible audio so when you touch the leads of this tester together you get an audible little squeal and that is a signal to let you know that this meter is sending a signal out on one of these leads coming back into the meter so from the meter sending a signal to the meter it's receiving a signal so it just basically makes an audible noise when there's a complete loop a complete circuit from the tester to the tester that is a very handy thing to have and I'll talk a lot more on continuity testing in a later video I'll show you a little sample clip of how that kind of works so you can start thinking about troubleshooting techniques and where you would use that well if you're a service tech you're going to use this a lot more because you're coming into problems and you need to be able to properly diagnose what the hell is going on in a circuit if you're doing construction you're probably not going to use these as much until you go to trim out your job do and punch-list stuff just trying to make sure that the system works but service techs use these all day every day and use them religiously so let's break in a little bit deeper and show you how to use them and some of the functions inside of here all right so how you test for voltage is again testing for voltage you're testing between two things so you're never getting a value you're not like testing one hot if we went from one lead to the other there is no difference of potential between this hot and itself so you're never going to get a voltage if you're trying to test one thing you always have to test between two things so this is telling you that there's 249 volts of potential between this hot and the other Hut the neutral is a center point in the system between both of these phases so you should get half that voltage between one hot and neutral and we do we get 125 between this hot neutral we get 124 as long as you're like around 120 volts from a hot to neutral and around 120 volts from the other hot to neutral and you've got to 40-ish between hot and hot then everything should be okay so the other thing that I like to do when I'm testing voltage is specifically in a panel but even if I'm just doing like outlets or anything like that I always test between the two phases then I test one phase to neutral the other phase to neutral and then I test each phase to ground I got 120 there 120 there and then I test last thing is neutral to ground now it says zero and you want to make sure that it says there you don't ever want to have a difference of potential between your neutral and your ground at every service on every building and every grounded system that you're going to be working with you want to always make sure that the ground and the neutral are bonded at the service if you ever see a fluctuation if you ever see like 50 volts between your neutral and your ground you know that there's a huge problem and you need to get that fixed ASAP because you can start burning up there's a lot of hazards that that could cause and I'll talk more about that later but that's voltage in a nutshell alright so how do we test for amperage amperage inside of this little jaw there's two little lines that go across here and that's the point where you need to be taking your measurement so right now I'm testing on black phase on this breaker it says point three amps which is very little if anything there might be like a light bulb on that and red phase will do the same thing there's point four so I'm going to turn a load on so that you can see what it looks like once current starts flowing through a wire go ahead all right shut it off all right so what just happened is the current spiked all the sudden we just turned a fan on in the shop and it's just a 42-inch you know big shop fan the current spiked really high and then it started to come back down to more of a nominal level and that is pretty much any time you turn on a motor that's gonna happen it's gonna spike have a whole bunch of inrush current and then it's going to go back down and kind of balance out so that is testing current on just an average wider now the problem becomes this jaw in here only works for smaller conductors like if you do number six number eight number two for or anything like that it'll fit in there but what happens when you try to put it on feeders so anything that's like four ah you know 250 500 MCM you're not going to be able to fit inside of this job so you actually need a clamp-on ammeter and that's why I have a second meter so for any large wires you're going to use something like this I mean you could probably fit five hundred MCM maybe even a little bit larger wire than that but if you're checking any like service entrance conductors or feeders that are coming in to a panel you need one of these that you can clamp on to larger wire and take a reading it operates functionally the same way there's two little lines in there so you want to make sure the center of your wire meets up with those lines to get the most accurate reading okay so what I've done is I set up three different 500 foot rolls of th HN so this is 1500 feet of wire still probably not a lot of resistance a few ohms but it's at least gonna show you that you're gonna start getting values rather than it just saying oh well you know when we when we hit this actually it says 1 means there's only an ohmic resistance and it's an average so there's you know if you had a you had a multimeter that was a little bit more sensitive and had decimal places it would show you like a far better value but again this is just basic multimeters so this isn't designed for like really really technical precise voltages amperage is all that stuff it's all it's just Auto ranging and it's finding averages so with these touching it shows 1 that's a 1 ohm of resistance now if we go through 1,500 feet at number 12 wire you're still gonna hear that tone because there's not a lot of resistance at a certain point this thing will stop toning it won't see it as continuity anymore because it's just not receiving it's not sending and receiving that signal in whatever fashion it needs to for this thing to think that it's continuous piece of wire at a high enough resistance all it's going to do is show values it'll show like 600 ohms or like 250 ohms or something like that but I don't have enough space and enough wire and enough stuff to set up right now to show you like a really high resistance setting on this thing so when I touch these together you still hear the tone but this thing says 3 ohms so it's a little bit higher resistance because there's more material it has to go through so what I'm gonna do right now is show you if you touch this to this you get a tone right basically I'm sending out a signal on the black lead that's going to one side of this coil the signals making it all the way through that wire out to here so when I touch this the signal completes and goes all the way back to the meter I got a full loop okay so I know that that wire is not broken now that may seem like a stupid thing you're probably never gonna sit and do that out in the field but I'll show you some instances that you might use it out in the field so let's say that you let's say that you are in a panel and for some reason you got three twelve two MCS hanging in the panel and you don't know which one goes where somebody didn't hook them up or you just installed them but forgot to label them as you were doing whatever if you want to know which one of each one of these wires is which how are you going to do that they all three go up and like split out so what I would do is I would go to one end of that circuit I would take the black and the white conductor and I would put a wire nut on them put them together and then I'd walk all the way back into the panel room and I would test each one of the blacks and whites of those three wires one of them's gonna tone out because you're sending a signal out there on the black it's coming back on the white and hitting your meter so it's gonna tell you like oh that's my wire and if you test the other two they're not going to do that because the blacks and whites out there in the field are still separated now you got to make sure they're separated because sometimes when you cut a wire that black and that white end up pinched together and they're touching each other so that's a good field instance of why you would use continuity all right so that's it that is the the kind of like 101 version of how to use a simple multimeter I'm gonna do some videos coming up about which multimeters I like more because I've got a bunch of other different types I know I've got a few more sitting around here somewhere I've got smaller ones that you know instead of having like an exact number display it shows ranges I've got ant probes where you have a clamp-on ammeter for doing large size wire so I've got a lot of different meters and I'm gonna do one video coming up about all the different types of test equipment that you want to know how to use as an electrician and then I'm probably going to do a review on some meters that are specific some of them that I like some of them I don't like features advantages benefits all that jazz so thank you guys so much for watching let me know in the comments below if there's anything else you'd like further explained if I kind of like muddied things up and didn't explain things well or if you have any preferences of meters or just anything that you think that I missed or you'd like me to talk about more love you guys I will see you next episode you [Music]

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 265,927

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, apprentice, journeyman, master, electrical vlog, electrician vlog, electrical show, electrician show, electrician u, dustin stelzer, how to use a tester, how to test electricity with a multimeter, multimeter, ohms, voltage, digital multimeter, continuity, alternating current, voltmeter, troubleshooting, multimeter tutorial, how to use multimeter, how to use a multimeter, multimeter for beginners, how to use multimeter to check voltage, fluke multimeter

Id: GNrSiSmB2DU

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019