The Best Multimeter Tutorial in The World (How to use & Experiments)

I'm going to do simultaneous measurements with a very nice expensive on a fluke and then I also have myself a $10 craftsman one that I picked up just for this video so you're welcome and we're going to work with both of these side-by-side so the first thing I'm going to do is just give a quick comparison between the to denote how to properly use them and why someone would pay 150 to 400 for a fluke multimeter here's a different fluke one that works and why if you just want to measure a couple things it's okay to get one of these it's really not a big deal especially if you're just starting out or if you want to do a couple measurements maybe you're installing a ceiling fan and you're not quite sure whether that brick or is really off or not I've seen breakers that show off and still have power flowing through them so I'm going to open this one and then we're going to do a quick comparison and then we're going to get straight to it alright so which is small time meter well the one thing to notice is and this is really indicative of all economical or cheap meters is that they have what seems to be more options if you're not familiar what you're looking at because you look at this more expensive one here and it looks like hey okay it's it's less words and you know perhaps it does different functions but it's simpler right maybe doesn't do as much then you look at this one look wow look at all these different ranges look what it can do well this meter doesn't automatically Zone in or automatic range what voltage you want to measure you have to know that somewhat ahead of time you're not going to damage it it just won't give you a correct reading that's all that's all the difference as far as why this one has between 600 and 200 millivolts and you know this one here when it comes to measuring DC take a look it just says V it doesn't say anything else but that so that's an important reason why you may pay more for one of these meters just because you don't have to play around with for the most part if you're just using a multimeter for example you're installing a ceiling fan or you're replacing a power outlet or a septic Oh you know these work pretty well if you're looking for more precise measurements obviously this might not be the way to go if you're thinking about using the multimeter a lot not just once every you know month or so then I definitely want to make sure you probably grab yourself one that's bit more industrial this for example may not be as efficient in using the batteries that you put in so this may only last a couple hundred hours maybe this will last another one lasts even more this one may not have auto shutoff certainly the ratings for electrical properties resistance how much current it can hold aren't going to be as high as something like this in fact you can you can tell for example right here this is a category two okay now when we look at this meter here it's talking about a category four and category three depending on what voltage level you're dealing with 600 volts or a thousand volts again this is a ten dollar economical version you basically if you want to measure voltage DC direct current for example you want to measure battery voltage then you would turn to for example up to 20 volts and you would measure it and you would connect the com this is the central one and since you're measuring voltage resistance maybe you want maybe the internal resistance of a battery if you want to measure the resistance of a wire or you want to see if the wire is broken this is where you would go for something like this do you want to measure a resistance of a resistor there again that's what you would use that for this test a diode also beeps when there's connectivity this one outputs voltage so this is why this requires a 9-volt battery in order to properly test the diode you need that this one has a built-in feature specifically to test a 9-volt battery or 1.5 volt battery it's possible that this multimeter could be putting a small load on these and potentially giving a more accurate reading than for example moving it up to you know two volts over here I don't know we can check that later now the reason why that's gray is right here saying if you want to measure current you keep calm where it's at but you move the voltage home and Milly answers to here and the reason why there are two basically has to do it the way it's fused with these two connected and you're measuring something like a battery or small circuits maybe you're trying to measure a fuse that's fine we're measuring a small circuit with power on that's what you need current for right then this is okay but if you take a close look you need to read because what it says here is 200 milli amp max right that's point 2 amps max that you can take where you'll blow the fuse out and this won't work if you want to measure a current that's higher than that up to 10 amps then you need to use the calm and the 10 ampere into can disconnect from here and connect to here this 10 amp has an internal fuse and this circuitry for this today should be as separated away from the microprocessor and the internals as possible so that way if this blows it doesn't affect the multimeter it doesn't play with this because it's so much current running through it doesn't destroy it that's why they're separated here okay now for comparison when we're dealing with amperage this one you would you would turn to milliamp and if we zoom in real quick we can see again we connect to calm here just like we did with this one so this one had to come here so for this multimeter when we're talking about measurements come here milliamp here anything greater than 200 milliamp you would need to use this one this is again just your measuring current and be very very cautious about keeping consistent with these readings this is 10 a.m. for 30 seconds max okay and this basically states that don't just continue leave this measuring current and think that it's okay for a half hour you're going to blow this and potentially blow this entire thing just because it's cheap and I'm not sure how much I would trust really how much I would trust putting 10 amps is that is a lot of juice at any rate when we go to here this fuse portion up to 400 milliamps now this doesn't make it better because the other one was 200 milliamps in this is 400 millions it's just the way that this is designed and again you see that there's a 10 amp here up at 10 amps max now there's no time on here that's something you need to look at the manual for just because there's no time doesn't mean that you can put 10 amps through this all day and all night and expect that it's not going to be an issue because 10 amps again is a lot of juice the 400 milliamp or the small milliamp rating in our economical version as well as our voltage and our resistance reading were all combined in one okay and the high current was separate with this multimeter again this is a bit more expensive one we see that they have completely separated a circuitry to measure mil amps amps voltage currents and diodes so they've separated them again probably more for numerical finesse you want to make sure that you get better resolution and to do that sometimes it's just better to an easier to separate the circuitry so that's the difference there one other difference that I should mention is that the probes are certainly going to be different in addition to having different category rating the wires for example may not be as great quality the tips may be of just may have nickel or some type of metal on there that can easily chip and in that you know that could affect a reading later on if it starts to peel whereas if you have a bit more expensive probes you may not experience that for example these probes right here they're category three for a thousand volts and category four for 600 volts and this these can handle 15 amps max so just order caution if you're going to play around make sure that whatever probes come with the multimeter and you go that one you wouldn't want to switch these probes throw them on this multimeter and then expect the same performance you would notice you know it may be even detrimental since these are category three and these can be kept up to category four of a thousand volts these can only handle 600 volts so don't mix and match they're not like shoes and outfits at any rate so here we go we're going to do something simple we're gonna first we're going to measure a battery so batteries are DC so we're going to take our fluke we're going to tell it we want to DC it says auto range hence wives have been partially more expensive for this one since we're measuring a battery we want to select the range so we're going to say right around 200 millivolts or just two volts and let's go ahead and measure it so we've got our trusty industrial battery here move there we go with my cell phone this so it's reading right around one point to one point seven volt flying back and forth a little bit now when I use my little fun one let's take a look at how it performs again I'm connecting the negative and here's the positive reason it shows 1615 because I showed where I selected 2,000 millivolt if I raise it up to just between 20 volt now I'm getting one point six two volt so you're not going to damage the multimeter if you go way over right when you go way under it's not going to damage it but your readings aren't going to look correct and most of the time you can just feel like clearly my battery's not 1613 volts so there you go so you can see the decimal point at the 200 you can see the decimal point at the 20 the difference between these two and you get better resolution if I want to measure up to 200 volts you see that decimal point moves back measure conductance I want to see if something is conductive and you can do that a couple ways some of the readings actually make a tone other ones you can just use the own so I'm going to keep everything where I met since I'm measuring ohm and what I'm going to measure conductance opposite is a piece of tape and I know that sounds kind of odd but this is metallic tape and for a project I actually use this as a lead I was making a circuit board and I cut out a couple patterns since I was using low current and I was you know basically I was using this as a wire even though it's just you know fancy sticky tape so let's say you didn't know whether it was conductive because initially I didn't I thought maybe there was some type of plastic over this some type of polymer there you go very very low resistance so let's take a look if I put it on this tape it jumps a little bit but that's it so this tape is conductive so again I was able to use my multimeter for something that you wouldn't typically think hey let's see if my tape is conductive but indeed it is and as I said you can use this for leads for a circuit board if you want current to go around something you could use it for that anything you want since it's it's it's very flexible now what about our craftsman over here what are we going to how is this one going to work well let's take a look since I'm measuring ohms I'm going to just bring it down to 20k it doesn't matter again you're not going to break if you go over under but for our sake let's just move it to 20k the middle and then play around with whether we think it should go up or whether we should go down so we're going to going to connect them right here so if you want to get more specific if you want to see more resolution we can just move it down now we get a little bit more resolution now we get even more because we have there look of our period is that so we see 1.0 3.2 I mean it's jumping around as I'm moving these leads because this isn't perfectly flat and and for other such reasons but adds for all really intents and purposes this is a conductive wire people parrot probably best nut homes for resistance and so what I have here is a resistor I don't know the value of it so I just measure the value of it okay so instead of seeing zero now we're seeing one that means it's perfectly conductive right well no because look we're at 200 ohm our resolution is wacky it's what I mean it's way too low so let's move it up one this is 1000 but 1000 what so let's move it up to 20 K so it's between 0.99 and 1.0 kilo so it's 1 kilo ohm resistor now we can certainly verify that by so it's already at the ohm reading know if that do anything so let's go ahead and try it again and I believe I was touching it before so one point zero zero two kilo ohm exactly what the other one stated so perfect measuring resistors all right so let's measure the voltage with this guy when we're going to use this one first all right so we've got our we've got our two probes it doesn't matter since it was measuring AC and it alternates back and forth between positive negative negative positive doesn't matter which end you put in what does matter though if you want accurate readings is what setting you choose on here since we're measuring voltage get knot current so it stays where it's set that's what the V is for we're going to measure voltage and in the u.s. voltage is 120 right guys voltage alternating current and right around 200 that's what we would expect to be it's going to be you know 120 so let's go ahead plug them right in and nothing they really disadvantage is that you have to select your own and if you're not paying attention if you looked at this and you should voltage AC 200 I don't know that you know most people would say okay that that's it's it's dead there's nothing in here if they went to 600 then all suddenly 121 volts and to be frank this is a problem okay 200 volts I don't think they should have used that system of metrics knowing that people are going to probably use this to measure AC power of outlet C electrical receptacles I think this was again a bad design on their part because a lot of people may assume hey it's a 120 volt this is 200 volt right it's greater it should show but it doesn't be very careful go up one more if you're not sure it'd be worth getting one that maybe is mid-range one that automatically selects the voltage so you're not guessing or you're not playing with it so on the safe side I always go a little bit higher just to make sure you know the number is not really low sort of speak fit was over here and you're seeing zeros padded to the left of that that's what's happening basically here right it's 120 but the decimal point is here so it's one two zero so this will be point one two zero I guess it just feels like it should not have to you know show anything so that's not I would say that this is a bad design bad design again we're measuring voltage so I'll put them in the voltage we're measuring AC solder ranging so there's no threat of accidentally not selecting the right one I should just do a plug it right in I try that again and get a davol tidge from there 120 point one volts this one shows a little bit of resolution it's more expensive now I mentioned that you know I wanted to show you how I would to use a multimeter for and here's something that I found out the other day and this is something that we can investigate together I haven't done this yet there's a switch on the wall that's over that yonder that if I turn it off it turns the power off on this here's the interesting part though this right here is a little light so I can see where I'm going so I don't disturb my toe as often and I have that switch off and yet this is still partially on it's clearly a wiring problem so I'm going to go and shut off this and wise I've shut this off you can see what this what the reading becomes because I was very surprised to see that and this is why you would use a multimeter the switch is off twenty five point six volt available this switch is off and yet we're getting some serious voltage obviously this receptacle either needs to be replaced there could be a grounding issue the switch on the other side could have grounding issues this can cause you know issues not only with electronics in general but also its safety if fluke and other companies they make a probe tester see if there's voltage and all it does it lights up and goes misses or beeps or blinks I have one myself if I would have tested it on this outlet right here it wouldn't have worked because it's too low yet there you go twenty five point six volts out readily available so this is why you would use a multimeter and this is why I always use a multimeter to confirm that there's nothing actually in here another option available is the continuity test in a diode current should only be flowing one way if it flows the other way we have problems the diode could be bad for example what I really like about this continuity test is that it makes noise so it's like the own operation in a sense but what it does is it introduces voltage into the probes and if that voltage reaches zero it makes a beep so basically have an audible signal rather than just having to read here and here and here and here and here you don't have time to look at this each time you can just sit there and listen actually why don't we do that let's just probe the damn thing all right so move it to a continuity tester give it a quick test good multimeters every single time you touch it regardless of how long the duration you should hear the beep these cheaper multimeters a lot of times if you go too fast it will act like as if it didn't beep we'll give that test a little later I want to see if this is communicating with any other part of the board I could okay so this means that this point it is is connected all right so this means that this diode has somehow a direct connection on an indirect connection but it's and that's the advantage I can go and quickly probe through a circuit board and test continuity all right continuity tester so let's do what I've done with the other probe let's go quickly through this and see if we can you hear that tolerance when it should be panned what not should be perhaps it's too wide right so it's not confidence statistically speaking of course and of course that's it's going to work but if I went through and tested it real quick may not catch it circuit analysis probably not the best thing to do with this little guy right here now resistance as we spoke earlier basically is the measure of how much voltage can go through and it depends on the properties of a resistor of the material depends on the temperature sometimes the pressure of whatever you're using in this case we want to measure how much current carrying ions that they're not are in the water so here's what we're going to do this is a fairly very easy basic test now I put different problems in here I'm just going to toss them right in and turn this old reading to where we can start getting some numbers so 200 kilo ohm resistance that's when it's currently at and it says 33 or 32 kilo ohm so 30 mm owns clear we're getting different readings don't be alarmed it all depends on quite a bit of this depends on how far the distance between the probes are where the ions are this is just tap water so there's going to be some ions floating around in there which means it's somewhat conductive now when we put this guy in here salt what should we expect it to do right watch what what should we expect the resistance to be well I don't know what the resistance is going to be but I do know one thing I know that when we add salt to water we're going to have basically what's called an electrolyte and so we basically have when we put some of this in there is that sodium and chlorine should disassociate should break apart and as a result of that the sodium which is conductive it's a metal should didn't be able to basically be a charge carrier and start allowing charge to flow back and forth because can be literally moving back and forth between these probes as we do that we should start noticing the resistance of these guys going down now it's not predictable how much down they're going to get it doesn't matter all we're going to do is just see if we can observe the resistance going down a little salt water or a little salt now it's not necessarily going to be immediate I probably should mix that a little bit break the NaCl apart and it will start carrying more current I'm just putting more in right now to speed up the process I'm a it's kind of cold in here if I had hot water this would of course be much much better we can see that the fluke is now reading considerably less now it's at three before was at eighteen and it may have to move this craftsman down a notch to give better resolution there we go so it's not right about three so now look at we're about getting more consistent readings between the two and that should make sense as I'm just associating the sodium and the chloride it means that this is becoming more conductive as it becomes more conductive we should see that the resistance should reduce a little more here again I'm just trying to speed up the process with a little bit of work on my part you can see that the resistance has dropped initially this was showing 18 kilo homes now it's around 1.6 this one was showing 30 kilo ohms now it's around 2.8 9 so now I'm just going to have a little fun now I'm going to be a little bad and I'm just gonna pour a whole bunch in there let's just have little extra fun dude hmm really just pour it on there that's nice that's nice that is nice now if I wanted now if my goal was to trying to see how conductive I could get the easiest way to do that is not to sit here and me to do all the mechanical work of breaking it apart it easiest way B to boil is if I boil this who it'd be conductive quick now I added a lot more salt in here you can see the numbers are starting to decrease again more rapidly most of the salt as unfortunately is now collected at the bottom it's really late and I need to stay up because I want to finish this video this is horrible so um I'm gonna try a little salt water maybe it's the cure-all maybe it'll just make me stay awake and get this video done right for you guys probably gonna be pretty disgusting oh good lord mmm basic chemistry that reminds me mmm if your glands are swollen this is not a multimeter tip but if your glands river swollen a little bit here gargle saltwater when you're measuring light bulbs and you want to check see if they work you can really only do that with these guys because they have a filament that goes up zigzags its way across the other end and connects back down so just like a wire it has resistance and continuity so you could for example change it to the continuity and keep one end on the outside and the other firmly down and you notice that it parently isn't enough for this continuity tester to go off so we can move it to the resistance so it's what's about 26 27 all all this is telling us is that this light bulb still works and I only mentioned this for example if you're not sure whether you should change the light bulb if you change two or three of them and they are none of them worked or you're just curious whatever the reason is it's another good reason to use the multimeter for I'll try the continuity tester on this first see if this one goes off yeah sure enough it does so it's saying 25 ohm so it within this range it's saying hey coulier's connection and that beep is going off so I know that this light bulb works depending on what you would use this type of switch for this could be a kill switch and oh switch red switch the button that you used to launch a new whatever but what if you didn't have the schematics for this maybe there's no writing or it was on there and you couldn't see how this was designed my point is what if when I press down which ones connect or disconnect how would you know for certain let's say you had to replace the switch with another one and you had 10 minutes to do it and you couldn't find the schematics you have a multimeter but you don't have the schematics does this close a circuit does it open a circuit how would you know well you could spend probably 10 15 minutes looking it up here they have potentially a model number that may help but more than a not more than not most likely you'll have these switches and you won't know exactly what the connections are one of the ways that you can do this is to simply just set it to you can set it to own and you just start probing from a common point and see so let's keep it up and let's test it out so it's conductive there not conductive they're not Cove there so in other words closed open open all right so now here's the audible rather than just looking at the resistance closed open open so that means that potentially these two when this Killswitch is active in protecting potentially these could disconnect and these two could connect I don't know but this far what we know is these two are connected these two are not so now let's kill it let's see if we can discover what just occurred inside here interesting my once closed is now disconnected no connection no connection so thus far what I can be certain of is that when this was open these two we're connected a closed circuit these two were open circuit so what I'm going to try now is to go down to this one because I suspect that this is one set and this is another set when it's open as it is right now these two are connecting these two are disconnecting when it's closed these two are disconnecting or an open circuit this becomes a closed circuit or it's connecting just what I'm assuming and we can test that theory right now I should hear an audible noise if now these two are connected if my theory is correct and indeed that's exactly what's occurring and I should not hear any noise on these two they should be completely separate so as expected so in very short order we were able to basically find out the internal schematics for this guy right here I didn't need to look it up on Google just simply by using the continuity or the resistance reader you could also use by the way on the resistance meter does test switches to see whether or not if you're using a a rocker switch whether or not this good connection maybe the switch is bad and there's a high resistance when you press a little bit when you press harder on it then there's a less resistant all right so on this particular multimeter it has a nine volt and a 1.5 volt measurement option and I'm really quite curious to see if that's any fat readings going to be any different than if I just go to my DC and I measure it that way I want basically what I'm trying to see if there is a load if they put a like a couple resistors in line and series just to test whether because you can have a high voltage battery that appears to be high voltage but as soon as you pull current from it as soon as you try and load it with a load it fails and it happens a lot with car batteries say 20 volts and again line this up and I'm getting one point six 2 volts roughly now I want to move it to the 1.50 and I want to see if I get any different reading on that so I'm getting a one point five five five volt right to make sure it's not me I'm going to switch it back so there seems to be a little bit of a difference barely so potentially it could be putting a small load just to get maybe a bit more of an accurate reading so all of this basically means that this batter should be good to go for this next measurement I'm going to measure current now a couple warnings and please don't fast forward this part especially if you're just not sure of what I'm even referring to current is what kills people not voltage if you want proof of that think of the time in winter when you're walking around and you get shocked or you shock someone in return that's twenty or thirty thousand volts did you die current on the other hand will kill and it only takes I'm not mistaken something like one or two and that depends on the body chemistry if you're a lightweight if you drink salt water like I just did if you went exercising if it's a humid day or not humid day all of those can drastically affect how your body reacts to current so be careful and if you're not sure what you're doing then don't do it because you don't want to get into an accident you don't want to hurt yourself or get yourself killed because you didn't take appropriate steps to maybe ask a professional ask someone who knows what they're doing another thing that I want to talk about real quick is this in order to measure current the multimeter isn't an accessory or isn't seen as alien to the circuit it is quite literally part of the circuit this means that the multimeter when it's connected will keep the circuit going if you disconnect the multimeter the circuit should no longer work that's how you know you're measuring current and that's why you have to be so careful not only you have to be careful not to touch the probes or careful where you put the probes especially if this in the close quarters with high voltage or high current components you also need to be careful because this multimeter may not support that rating this is ten amps but very carefully if you utilize that point earlier says only for thirty seconds max and I wouldn't even go for that I have no idea what the amperage rating on that is the other thing is make sure your probes are also compatible to measure the amount of current and they should they're certified the reading should say so here it says cat three one thousand volt but let me take a look on this cable this cable says two thousand volts eighteen American wire gauge can work up to eighty degrees Celsius this one's ready to cat three a thousand volt and at ten amps so this is telling us again and that and that should make sense right it should make sense because if the multimeter can take ten amps certainly you would expect the probes tool if it was any lower even compatibility where this can measure more but these won't all right let me run through again what's happening I have current traveling through that top black probe this guy right here is traveling through here it's going to it's going to my multimeter which is currently set at ten amps right now and because we're measuring current I have it in the gray one which I showed earlier that must be connected when you're measuring it ten amps and it's AC ten amps so connect into the wall outlet after that I've got it connected to the red probe which is double clipped with alligator clips to the main outlet then it's going through the toaster it's coming back out again into the black connector finally it's returning home through that screwdriver this is why you don't give children screwdrivers because you can very easily stick it into a wall outlet ask my mom for details so I'm going to turn it on notice not an issue so far and what we're looking to do again is we're looking to measure current and keep in mind this is fairly dangerous I do have live Kerner's another lives so I have to be very careful those two are close although they're separated so just be cautious here we go there we go so right now it's measuring six point seven three amps so when someone has a toaster in the microwave on it's very evident why a fuse can go especially this older homes have a 10 amp fuse you put a toaster on you only have three point three amps left before the fuse blows and you can also notice that the resistance is increasing because these coils are getting hotter and hotter and hotter inside this toast and as those coils get hotter and hotter it increases resistance all six and six and three-quarters amps are going through that multimeter this is why I encourage you not to use these cheaper multimeters because if an engineer in a different country makes it you can't verify whether the UL certificate is justifiable whether when they say up to a thousand volts or ten amps whether that's really true or not I've read many stories whether you people have used these cheap amps and they've run a test like this and thing has blown or the probes have melted with this much current coming through here you know any of those situations can occur so right now we're at six point eight six amps my toast I can feel it oh definitely getting heat through here all that current that's making that toast possible is going through that multimeter and there we go we have successfully measured current hell of a lot better than saltwater you

Channel: Dan The Technology Man

Views: 3,468,540

Rating: 4.6245065 out of 5

Keywords: Multimeter, Experiment (Literature Subject), switch, conductivity, resistance, ohms, diode, tutorial, tour, Do It Yourself (Hobby), light bulb working, Probes, voltmeter, oscilloscope, electrical, electrical engineering, wiring, watts, power, conductive tape, fluke, fulke meter, fluk meter, fluke voltmeter, electronics, Beginners guide on using electrical multimeters for autos, beginners guide on multimeters, audio multimeters, How To Use A Multimeter, How to Use a Multimeter for Beginners - How to

Id: lo8MWr3NuuM

Length: 41min 29sec (2489 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2015