How to use a Multimeter

hi there welcome back to pretty much Flawless today in this video we're going to be looking at multimeters different types of multimeters and their uses and applications stay tuned so let's say we want to make a measurement on a battery so what we do is we put it over to the voltage DC range here so if we turn the power on some multimeters have an off position on the selector switch but if it has a button we'll select it over to about two volts right here two volts DC you can adjust that range up to 20 volts 200 volts or even 1000 volts on this meter here so I'll go back to two volts DC we'll plug in our probes so the black will go to Common like a common negative and then the pause the red or the positive will go to volt ohms so out of this port you can measure volts and ohms so we'll put that in and we have a double A battery here test so we take our probes and I'll measure that put the pause thing positive to the positive the battery the negative to the negative so we get a reading of 1.451 volts so if we were to reverse our leads then we get that same number only negative so that is how you measure DC volts next we'll go over to talk about AC so we'll switch it over to this here's the AC symbol so volts ac you can see that squiggly line there and I'll put this up to 200 volts so I will measure line voltage right now so same thing so you have the volt and Ohms a port and a collar this time it doesn't really matter which one so just plug this into Outlet over here start with that so you can see that says about 120 it's a 115.2 volts ac so it doesn't really matter which probe I plug in for AC because it's continuously alternating so yeah so that's how you would measure voltage with a multimeter so we were just measuring voltage let's say we want to measure resistance we turn our multimeter over to the range that has the ohm symbol on it or the Greek letter Omega representing ohms in a circuit so I know that this is a 1K resistor but how close is it to 1K it could vary a little bit so what we'll do is turn it over to 2K that's a above closest range we have 1K but above that so what we'll do is we'll put this all right so and this is a 1K resistor so you can see it's 1.010 K ohms so or a thousand ohms so I don't say good 1K resistor a 1000 Ohm resistor so we're just learning about the old scale but on most multimeters on the own scale there's also this audible continuity thing some multimeters don't beep there's some dust let's short the probes as you can see it's making a beeping noise so this would be Protestant continuity it's kind of useful for example let's say I had this wire and if I don't know if it's broken or not from the one side to the other side so we'll check this pull to one side hold the other side and this would be a good wire so and also if you notice below here this is a diode symbol so this is also be used for testing the voltage drop across diodes this is a silicon Junction diode and they would have a voltage drop of typically 0.6 to 0.8 so we can measure that voltage drop so you see it's about uh there's no decimal point on this multimeter that'd be 0.58 volts a voltage drop there so 0.5 volts voltage drop so that's okay for a silicon Junction diode so next we're going to talk about the amperage scale so right now I have a whole circuit wired up and first of all what we're going to talk about is how to measure amperage amperage is different than measures voltage and there'll be a short explanation that'll come on the screen now we're going to talk about why you measure voltage and parallel and amperage in series so here's a circle with a volt meter as you can see you circled the V8 that'd be a voltmeter measuring across here I have this power light bulb so what this voltmaker is doing is measuring the diff the difference between the negative here and the positive I'll save this is a 5 volt battery that you have a 5 volt difference across the multimeter here now for amperage you measure amperage with series like so so this is our multimeter was set to amperage as you can see so a multi are set to amperage it's very basically a very very low resisted uh resistance so basically what that will do is it'll just measure the current Going Through the Wire so not the volt not the difference between the wire but how much basically current is Going Through the Wire and it's a very low resistance remember we were two so I guess just have this right in parallel with the battery here this would be a short circuit because basically these ammeters of very very low resistance so what that do is basically a short circuit all right I hope the explanation made sense so what we're going to do is first of all we have to make sure our plug is in the right spot right now we're going to be measuring on the mill amp scale so we'll put that on there there's also the 20 amps Max scale that'd be for much bigger loads and you can see here this is the 200 milliamp scale for amperage DC you see that symbol again the line three dots there so I have this whole circuit wired up and now what we'll do is we'll turn it on so you can see this led is drawing 22 point three milliamps so that's how you measure amperage but the same thing if you measure amperage AC too foreign features your multimeter might have for example this one right here will measure thirds for capacitors so flip it over to that scale over there for up to 200 microfarads you can do it smaller if you're measuring a smaller capacitor and then for my capacitor the shore up leads to make sure there's no voltage it's going to spike into my multimeter here put the positive these electrolyte capacitors do have a polarity you can see here this normally spanned right here marks the negative or the shorter leg if there was a negative I'll put that in the positive or the longer leg goes in the positive and this measures 41 42 microfarads and this is a 47 microfarad Fastener so that's pretty good another thing your multimeter might have is something to test the transistors so flip it over here this is to the normal hfe position and what this will do is we'll test your transistor here this is a npn transistor and have to put it in properly like that you mayor base collector you have to put those in properly add that in backwards I'm pretty sure there we go and you see this has 200 yeah there it was there 298 hfe so you can easily find some more videos about transistors to explain what hfe is but right now I'm just telling you how to use a Multimeter so and there's also some more things on this multimeter and you can normally refer to your owner's manual to to find out what that is another type of multimeter is this analog meter it's basically the same thing only one thing you have to be worried about is the actual polarity of your multimeter leads here because if you were to have it on both DC hook your positive up backwards then the needle here would try to go negative over here so you've got to mind the polarity for DC on that and in the ohms range then you also have to there's normally a knob somewhere on your meter you have to try to calibrate that to try to get it right at zero here I got about zero right there but you can also adjust this knob right here to get the meter further away from zero so that's something different with analog meters and then also when you switch Ohm's range you have to do the exact same thing see there's pretty close to that adjust this knob so thanks for watching hope you learned something and see you next time foreign

Channel: Pretty much flawless

Views: 10,395

Keywords:

Id: AmvWVsx8Xx0

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023