Measuring Electrical Current Above 10 Amps

foreign the cool stuff guys like Channel I'm going to show you how to measure electrical current that is greater than 10 amps and the only reason I really am making this video is if you look at virtually any digital multimeter you're going to see a little thing at the bottom that says maximum 10 amps so normally with these you would run them in line with your circuit and um you can you can apply the load or turn whatever the device is on and get your current reading of course if you do that something over 10 amps you're going to blow up your multimeter at worst or more likely you're gonna at least pop the fuse that's on the inside of it so the tool you're going to want to use when you get up above 10 amps is going to be one of these so this is still essentially a multimeter but it has this clamp feature on the front there's a couple kinds of these there's the cheaper option which is basically a Transformer around here so there'll be a little metal to metal contact at the tip and it creates this Transformer around the wire when it's uh when it's close but the better kind is gonna be the hall effect style that's what this one is this has no metal to metal on the end and it has a small hall effect sensor which will read um it'll basically create a small voltage when there's a magnetic field and the meter can then translate that voltage into how much electrical current is flowing through that wire so the beauty of the hall effect version is you can also measure DC not just AC and that's super helpful because on something like a car it doesn't take much to be above 10 amps when you're only at 12 volts the second huge beauty of these meters is its contactless so I don't have to connect wires I don't have to clip wires and run something in series I just clamp it right around it let's go ahead and I'll measure some DC stuff and I'll show you exactly how to do that here we are under the hood of this old F-150 and right now the truck's off so we shouldn't really see much of any current reading except that there is This little underhood light on so I'll go ahead and whenever we're measuring DC we've got a zero the meter and if I just clamp that around the positive battery clamp I see a reading of just under one amp and I should get that same reading if I were to clamp on the negative yeah so you see the same reading because it doesn't really matter which way it's flowing um it's going to measure it regardless of the direction of the current one thing though you'll see is I can only really clamp a power or a ground I can't clamp a power and the ground because it'll cancel itself out and you'll get a reading of zero so if I stick the clamp right up on this little light that has a power and ground wire I'm not going to get a reading let's go ahead and start the truck so we'll have the coil and the fuel pump and some of this stuff that's going to pull a lot more current will get a much bigger reading here [Music] all right foreign so now we're getting 10 and a half amps I've got electric fans on the truck and they're not on I'm gonna have to run it for quite a while for it to get hot enough to kick those on but this is super awesome because when I pulled these fans these are from a new um Ford Explorer I pulled them from the junkyard I had no idea how much current they were gonna pull because there's no documentation on that so I essentially had to figure that out before I could start sizing all the wires and things for my system now I'm going to shut this off and I'll show you how you can do this with AC current which is going to be a little bit different so here we have the plug for my air compressor which is going to probably be above 10 amps and when I kick it on I can't just clip it on here because like I said earlier we're going to cancel cancel our own selves out so what you need is one of these little guys which is a um line splitter so this will split the current so I can clamp on just one wire and something unique about this particular line splitter is you'll see it says X 10. and what that means is it's got a loop in here so it's basically gonna create its own coil it's going to pass that current past here 10 times so whatever the reading that I get is is going to be 10x multiplied I'm going to have to divide it by 10. kind of just allows you to get a little bit more of an accurate reading especially when you're dealing with really low current so go ahead and I'll kick this hideously loud thing on here clamp on [Music] so we saw about a hundred and eleven and taking in our 10x multiplier what that means is 11.1 amps I hope that's helpful for you I'll put a link to the xtec amp clamp that I'm using here these are super pretty high quality meters for way way cheaper than you're going to pay for like a fluke so if you're a diyer I think they're pretty good meter and I'll also put a link to the line splitter that I used in the video description that was just a pretty simple climb which Klein Tools usually pay quite a bit of money for but a line Splitters are pretty simple thing so it really wasn't too bad thanks for watching

Channel: Cool Stuff Guys Like

Views: 7,590

Keywords: Extech, Extech MA445, Extech MA444, Amp Clamp, How To Use, How To Measure, AC, DC, Current, Fluke, Klein Tools

Id: EQc_BqNrah8

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023