Tool Time: A Close Look At The Power Probe IV

welcome back to the cell phone Auto Channel it's another tool time and you've already seen the title of this video this one's on the power Brooke for why did I choose a Power Pro before I don't really have an answer for you and you guys know that I'm not a huge power probe user do I hate it no do I love it I don't think so but I have one I've actually still have the og the power probe one look at that relic and I think the power probe one is a great tool it was a fantastic idea you don't just you know a great little invention that guy took what we always wanted to do it you know made it a reality now we have this big long you know wad of wires we have a power and a ground available at the tip and we have the little tether hanging off it with the ground so we could you know plug it into the car and go back to the tail lights or the trailer we are working on use us a lot in a truck shop when I was fixing lights on you know trailers and trucks it you know some truckers they all like their lights on their Everywhere's and it's nice to not have to hunt for a good ground or for you know a power source to test you know my missing power of missing ground and move right along and half I guess part of the reason why I thought that we should take a look at the power probe for one because I've had it for like eight months to a year and haven't really used it much I don't know all of its abilities and - I see a lot of guys spending a lot of money on power probes not that they're you know awful expensive or anything but they buy him and then the only feature they use on it is that feature you know the power and the ground feature of course that's what makes a power probe a power probe but you know I glanced through the book there's a lot more things as little guy can do is a useful and our diagnostic arsenal that's to be determined however we can't make that assessment is you know as - is this a tool that we can use until we know what it can do and we know how to properly use it so I thought I'd take this time as I'm learning and educate myself to show you guys also give you the abilities to hit up that comment box if you are a you know diehard power probe user perhaps you can put the comment box like hey you know have you thought of this if you tried this if you've done that that's the best part about YouTube is that interaction you know there's something I missed and made a mistake there's the feature I don't know about in the comment box below best place to put that I've got little Jeep in here don't have anything broke but like I say you got to kind of practice a little bit first see what it does we'll go through the book and then hopefully throughout the next you know throughout this year next year whatever we can put it to you see you know then to save us some time with a helpful that would make the right call do we diagnose a circuit correctly you guys know first and foremost I'm a scope and a light bulb user I do like my test lights you know various loads some I'm still up in the air about you know about this tool because I don't use it I don't like change my methods you know especially something that are proven you know substitute load you know here's my fuel pump you know here's my solenoid you know there's various loads well let's get started let's just go over and hook it up go bananas we went through the book we'll learn what we can and see how it works it does have 23 feet of wire that comes with it so you can definitely get to where you got to get to you know cars up on the lift you've got this hook to the battery can be draped under the car and you can be all the way back at the fuel pump or back at the taillights or you know a trailer hitch or wherever it is that you're going with it from what I read it's in six or not six 12 to 24 volt capable comes with this big honker this is you know it's connector big 4 pin connector so that's kind of big but I guess it really doesn't matter I'm not here to critique it but it's here check it out twisted I get around it cable it gets into not immediately as you can see when you first turn it on it goes into its volt DC setting now this has obviously a colored screen like a little multimeter on it it does have an LED twin LED lights look at them babies so that's kind of fun removable tip with standard banana jack hook up right up in there so you can hook up you know test leads to it you know from a standard multimeter or like my AES wave test kit you can plug them little guys in so I forgot to tell you what I know about a little bit of what I know about it and then what kind of glance at the book color screen obviously we have the rocker switch anybody that knows power probe this is what makes power probe a power probe hit the button you get the classic I know hit it low to the negative you get the classic low note and at that point the tip voltage either becomes a ground or becomes a power supply what else do we have here you've got three little buttons on there you can silence the alarm if you don't want to hear it and I think it's fair to mention that we also have the green and red LEDs which have a function and that also has a function along with the alarm which I'll tell you about something I read and learned myself and then off the bottom of this little guy you have the auxilary wire here which is a full time battery ground because we're hooked to the battery this is a ground you know vehicle ground if we were to take it and touch it like a fool on that battery positive sparks are gonna fly and the fuse it's gonna blow there is a fuse a 20 amp fuse that goes down inside this little holder right here so be mindful that if you don't think you can control yourself and keep it from touching on something unplug it and then the banana jack is actually recessed up inside the plastic housing a little bit you can come over and not worry about accidentally hitting it of course you can you know you can get it up in there you can blow it if you want to so so there's that for you folks that are not familiar with the power probe which I'm sure it's probably small percentage this is what people do with it the majority of the thing we've got a got a light bulb here we're gonna hook it to battery negative we're gonna take the other wire here we're gonna hook at the battery positive I'm gonna turn off the beeper and then we're gonna push the button and we let the light and you can use that for all sorts of things you know I activate still annoyed you know blower motors power windows use your mind you know anything that runs off the 12 volt sets within its amperage capabilities now it does have a circuit breaker in it automatic resetting circuit breaker behind this cover and it does have limitations as to when the circuit breaker blows they're actually stated here in the book because I was kind of curious and sometimes I read directions 20-amp in the ground side at the tip eight amps you can flow indefinitely without tripping it you can flow up to 10 amps for 20 minutes 15 amps for 6 seconds 25 amps for 2 seconds or a short circuit point 3 seconds and it blows the breaker hi you know when it blows the breaker the old power probes used to have a mechanical resetting circuit breaker I miss I didn't go click and then nothing would work and then you have to push it back in about 10 seconds later after cool down now this one let's say you're let's let's do it up here where it's safe you're testing a ground you're hooked to ground and then you you gotta hit the button if you can't stand it Oh patel's you circuit breaker resetting and then it beats like that continually until it resets there we go now we're back to normal so you make a mistake it resets for it one thing that I have said about the power probe all power probes 1 2 3 4 the hook whichever one you have it's not a dangerous tool by itself it's no more dangerous than a gun as dangerous but the operator is what makes it dangerous let's say were coming along we've got the ECM right here and we're just poking wires because we like to poke wires and we're poking along poking along and you got this button and you get into a wire and it has a little signal on here like does that supposed to have power and then you go like that a little bit of smoke comes out of the box and it show over that's what makes the power probe dangerous mouth you got a guy with a test light and let's say he's got this little test light and he's going along and assuming he doesn't short two pins together you know with the probe he's just going along it's not gonna cause any damage you go along with this and start rocking the button you're gonna cause some damage you potentially could cause damage and that leads me to say this if you don't know the circuit design that you're working on then anybody can be dangerous you have to know what you're testing you know it's not the tools fault it's operator error you have to know what you're testing you can't just go do it in the hokey-pokey and you know putting your right foot in your right foot out you have to have a match yeah one diagram know what you're testing know what you're gonna expect to see and then make an assessment do I hit the button or don't I okay let's see what else is there well besides the fact we can send power ground we do have just your standard bolt display up on the screen there so when we hook it to battery power let me get a jump wire here so we can hold it by the camera right good enough and just got a regular banana jack here like that little guy now we are gonna turn that off and then we can see our battery voltage that's the voltage at the tip and that is without hitting the button it's just a live reading you know come over here to the outside hook it up to the ground side and there's our voltage reading at the ground side so just like an Evo and we can also notice that we have as I mentioned earlier or min max scale on the bottom how do you clear it you hit the Clear button and there we are how is that useful for finding opens intermittent problems you know you could have a hook to the wire like I say go through wiggle it see if it goes open it's gonna catch it we could use it to monitor our cranking voltage you know I can go in there and crank the key our maximum should stay at whatever its highest peak is and the minimum is gonna display whatever this little guy dropped down to when we crank it let me show you [Music] look better it was pretty low to begin with but we can take a look you can see our minimum voltage at what eight point eight nine you can see our charging voltage so this one example lots of things you can use that minimax setting on just like you could any other volt me alright well we won't spend a lot of time on that perhaps down the comment box you guys could say what you use your min max capture whether it's you know a DV om or you know on your power probe so I think another thing that we have to do which this is something I've learned from reading the book of all things is the LEDs you know we just think in you know we got we got power we got ground we've got the LEDs that turn on and off we got this you know that turns on and off but there's actually a time and I I don't really know how to word it there's a type of circuit integrity that has to be met or criteria in order for those lights to light up all right let's see you know like we hook this to my skin I got a hook to my thumb so we've got it right there and then I'm gonna touch the battery posit my other finger when we have eight points four bolts like you see we have no LED let me turn on the beeper again we have no LED and we have no beeper even though we're on battery positive all right well let me touch battery negative you can see we're showing battery negative you know zero volts 0.10.0 bouncing around the alligators getting a little play time a finger but we have no green light and no buzzer now why is that well that's just the design of the tool and why I try to spew it out to you when I can read it to you where are we here we're gonna go right here under this page this is page four because page four and page eight have kind of dip contradictory statements on them they both reiterate about the LEDs however this part on here I believe is false because well you have to read it for yourself but we'll look here at the green LED will light indicating a path to ground all right simple enough more than 10 old resistance and or more than 0.5 volts on the ground circuit the green LED will not illuminate so if there's more than when we touch the tip too you know a ground if there is more than 10 ohms of resistance in that circuit between where we touch in its path back to the battery it will not light the LED and if if there is more than a half a volt or voltage drop so the difference from the point we touch to the actual battery voltage is more than half whole different it'll still display but it will not light the LED or sound the alarm it's not simple enough well let's test that theory open up LEDs alarm voltage display let me get a little something over here so it says more than 10 ohms I've got a 10 ohm resistor let's just make sure it is a 10 ohm resistor just skip ahead here to lesson 4 we were gonna check their existence on this but you can actually do with this - let me do it off there we go so I'm gonna check the resistance on the resistor 10.1 ohms of resistance on the resistor ok so theoretically we're gonna go back into the DC test so we're back to the main screen now if we touch this resistor on the battery negative sorry dang it you know what why don't we just clicked up the battery negative there we go we have our tip voltage but we have no alarm and we have no LED indicating that our path the ground from the tip of this tool which is you know my jumper wire now for the sake of demonstration it's just like having the tip on there when we hook at the ground it is not blacken at us because it indicates that there is 10 ohms or more in that circuit so that is something to be mindful of we could get a little bit more in depth with that but we're gonna leave it at that it works as its States okay and then the red LED it tells us will illuminate indicating battery positive okay if the circuit voltage drop is more than a half a volt from battery voltage the red LED will not illuminate but it doesn't say anything about resistance in that circuit so theoretically if we take our 10 ohm resistor which without current flow we should have no voltage drop so when we touch our 10 ohm resistor on the battery it shouldn't black the lights and do its dance and it does because you know no voltage drop or see that worked 12 4.27 saying it's tip Moulton's there's no voltage drop so that's that's pretty interesting you know so if you get on a you know like I say if you get on a circuit like this you know that's more than a half a volt you know I'm just just touching it hooked up here hooked up here touching on my finger you know there's nine volts we're not within its range but if we were if we were at you know eleven point eight or eleven point nine volts you know it should you know flap off we could get our varying resistor over there and probably dial that down and figure that out but this seems to work as intended so we'll keep keep on trucking so keep that in mind if you're seeing a voltage but you're not hearing the LEDs why is that answers in the book baby we'll also put that in mind when we're doing some dialects what's next I think I'll just mention sometimes I do stuff that's quick and dirty and well I like to see if the circuit has the ability to carry current and sometimes you can like I say get quick and dirty with the old power probe so for example like that red plug on plug here this you know AC clutch here on the D so we have you know the power that comes from AC clutch really then we have a full time ground on it well let's say we're back there you know well let's say we're right here and we want to say you know is that ground you know this is a 15 amp circuit that runs us compress your clutch is that ground any good well ways with the wiring that's on it that wiring should easily be able to withstand that's you know 20 amps there will be still put out if I put it on the ground I give it full beans it blows the breaker well I know that that ground circuit well I can at least carry 20 amps so that make sense to you the green LED the tome indicates you know as it states in the book it's a ground circuit there's less than 10 ohms resistance in that circuit and I believe the breakers as soon as I hit the bottom so that tells me just kind of quick and dirty yeah that ground for that moment to take that 20 amp soon lots of things we could do I'm not gonna go through and demonstrate every single thing we can do with it we're gonna go on and check out some more of its features and functions so the next function it has is what they call the power feed tests or the PFT for people who like acronyms it states here that's used to check resistance on static circuits or voltage drops on active search circuits by simply probing one connection of the circuit being tested the PFD R PTF power test feed that's funny I got a typo here it's supposed to say PFT I found lots of typos in this book but it says PTF is supposed to say PFT so the power feed test measures total circle resistance from the source battery accurately whether there is voltage on the circuit or not unlike standard multimeters okay alright so most multimeters you want to check resistance on up you know wire or a circuit has to be unplugged and turned off otherwise it goofs you meter all up with the artillery ground lead PFT can also be used as a standard ole meter get T displays both battery tip or battery and tip voltage simultaneously for easy voltage drop tests now that I think is a great feature you know assuming it works so we have what we'll do here what you have to do to get into the PFT test you hit the mode button and then you hit the arrow where it says feed test and then you hit mode button again and there we are we're in the feed test and I constantly displace the battery tip voltage down there and in this mode the rocker switch does not work so you can't go nuclear on stuff that's kind of a nice they made that turn on now as they mentioned this is now a standard o meter or that's its claim to fame anyways get this rubber thing up here let me mess on my rubber the whole video there we go so that's up there now theoretically if we touch this to the tip well it somewhere has more resistance than we do then again we can take our 10 ohm resistor now this only measures up to 9999 ohms so just be aware of that got a notes limitations and like I say there's our 10 ohm resistor and I think I dug out I think this guy's within 2% or something so it should be good way or another so we'll stick this resistor on there there we are nine hundred fifty seven ohms okay so we have the ability to use it just as a standard ohm meter within its limitations you know up to you know almost ten thousand ohms what else it says that we can use it for voltage drop testing because it displays the battery voltage right there so that is the voltage where our meter is hooked up when we touched the tip it's going to display a tip voltage so that's essentially all you're doing when you're doing a voltage drop test where we're going from you know positive to positive we're going from the battery to the alternator you know positive positive we want to see the difference between this point here in this point you're going to see the potential difference and essentially you could take your measurement here with your DB om and then come over here take your measurement here and then subtract it - and that is your voltage drop and that's essentially what I think we can do with this tool now it calculates the resistance of the circuit I assume based on whatever drop it sees it would be nice if it just you know did the math for us and subtracted you know or took our battery voltage and subtracted tip voltage and gave us our voltage drop up on the screen maybe that's a feature they could add another button that we could push that would be kind of cool so let's do that let's let me throw a hose on this Jeep fire this thing up [Music] you can see there our battery voltages what first and our all Nader they can ask across the table from the alternator to the batteries battery was low on charge let's see let's throw some loads on here there we go nuclear a little bit see if that changes at all for us battery voltage 15.6 barely under 50 millivolts under Colo that clearly acceptable but you can see now we should be able to get a regular meter here and demonstrate this if I have just a standard you know dbo atom hooked up during a regular voltage drop that from the alternator positive to the battery positive just measuring potential difference from this point to this point and it's 0.17 wool and battery voltage and a difference fun's over or thereabout ruff decently accurate we could do the same thing on the ground side on the cats too you know the underground the compressor should be grounded to the whole chassis and the battery negative looking at with the central difference between this point and that point and it's about 1/10 of a bolt we've have a fully loaded now this should display just down standard tip voltage essentially will retain on the screen here budget this I know we've seen on TV om so that's kind of a neat feature because now we don't have to you know stretch our wires out you know from circuit the circuit assuming we're doing a voltage drop from the battery to you know you know whatever the X maybe if that makes sense because sometimes you have to do voltage drop on a circuit that is not you know from the battery so that's where you know things may change yeah you know I'm saying I mean you could have you know the HVAC controller out of and you're doing a voltage drop from one of the wires off the back of it to you know actuator or something like that you know you can do you can perform a voltage drop on you know any circuit off to you but in this case this tool can be used for doing voltage drop tests on you know power ground sides that you know of course mine with the battery so that's how to use the voltage drop portion of it like I said I think that's pretty handy that's nice to you know not have to you know hook a meter here over here you just have to do a little math you have to you know calculate the differential yourself like I say it'd be nice if they displayed the Delta on the screen instead of calculator resistance perhaps on the power probe for point one they can do that so also it's claimed the same here with this PFT PTF PFT I guess it is the power feed test it's claim to fame as open circuit you know voltage testing circuit integrity alright this is where I get a little icky because I always like to test with the load in place the thing to note is the operation of the LEDs and the audible tone in this mode are different than they are in the regular volt mode so we're in the bolt load you remembered that 10 ohms a resistance on the ground side would make it not light up however the power side it really didn't matter because I'm a power sight I had to be within a half a bowl of source voltage but when it's in this mode what's in power feed mode the 10 ohms is the way it calculates out both how is there in here if the circle resistance is less than 10 ohms the red or green LED will illuminate and a speaker will make corresponding tone so here I have a 20 ohm resistor and we're gonna go on the power side we're gonna hook it up and it does not blow off the tone it gives well let me zoom in on this for you I'll touch that resistor very positive we can see it displays a resistance 21 ohms it displays a tip voltage battery rolls twelve point six five two voltage twelve point six four but it does not blow off the whistle now if I go back then we go to the voltage touchscreen remember in this case it should and it does so it is important to know you know at what point you know it's gonna blow the whistle on us and it does display the correct ohm reading of our resistor in that circuit so you know yeah all right so it's kinda it's got to be able to have some current flow there to do that calculation I believe in the book it does say what its current draw it is we can always stick our meter on it I think it was quite low where you at little fella less than 30 milliamps in the power feed test that's the only way you can calculate circle resistance it has to have current flow to detect voltage drop and you know it's Ohm's law baby so there's that so you know like using our test light you know we put this in place you know BAM we're 250 milli amp draw four amp draw whatever it is you know if there's resistance in a circuit were likely to see it but voltage drop is always a way to go to be a hundred percent certain with the load in place now let's see where could this be useful let me just take a I do have a jumper wire right here we'll use and I guess we had when I guess we'll use this we've already got it out we've got a 20 ohm 20 own piece of courage and I hate demonstrations like this I just wish we had a broken car contact and then we got to Tesla right quarter watt resistor so hopefully she doesn't blow they're gonna go a little toasty all right so here's our here's our circuit we can see and it's lights a little bit dim now we could go through different points in the circuit using the voltage drop portion of it or what they claim we can do is you remove the load from the circuit this is where I've always disagree with everything if the loads there keep the load in place do voltage drop find the problem this is what they claim and remove the load from the circuit and now we can go through we can probe it well the audio Bowl tone is lit it gives our tip voltage in our resistance of zero ohms and our positive side is not the one with a resistor so is our problem on the ground side we go to the ground side oh no audio Bowl tone and then our display says 20 point 2 ohms tip voltage zero point zero zero all right well that's legit our problem is on the ground side I mean there's no doubt about it we implanted a resistor because that's what people do during demo videos because we don't have a broken car but let's assume we're on a you know that lights dim over here something like that and the problem is you know crochon at a connector can we do open circuit voltage testing and get the answer by theory yes we should it's just measuring voltage drop across the resistor or you know something in the solid state electronics that can create that and make the calculations so I'm not gonna prescribe to it I guess I don't know if that's right word until we have a broken car in here where we can test that theory now what if there is that situation where there is resistance generated by heat that's generated by the load that will not work I'll tell you that right now that's just that's just a fact of life you know that you can see during voltage drop in that scenario is realistic and that's realistic you know to have a circuit that let's say it's Oh midge is fine it can flow 250 milliamps fine but when let's say it's a you know fan mode or something once it gets ramped up to 5 amps ah there's a poor connection that gets a whole lot worse and then things quit working well you're not gonna find it with this bottom line voltage drop testing portion of it you'll find it because you keep the load in place you know the heat generated resistance fault that it has is there when it's you know hot and operating then you can go along absolutely you can use this tool for that if you know if you're looking for a bull strap from you know on the ground side or power side supply to it yes you can go along and find that absolutely without a doubt open circuit test it probably not so our next mode on the list is let's go the other way fella is our AC RMS so you're gonna use this like a standard meter let me go ahead and select that this is we're gonna check our average AC voltage output you could use this you know crank centers ABS sensors all Nader diode anywheres that you're gonna use the AC scale on your regular DV om you know we can start it up we can look for AC voltage being output from our you know from a bad diode cam sensors you know you name anything that's gonna you know I need an AC pulse generator type sensor we could use it for that perhaps you could pick it up in your honey vanilla what ABS sensors this is a one this should have you know our little generators on the wheels perhaps we can do that when we pick it up let's see what's our next mode here our next mode that is our PP tester this is where we test our pee pees or your AC voltage peak peak and then also has min max at the bottom so this essentially is gonna show both extreme points instead of averaging the AC voltage it's gonna show the maximum and then the minimum you know just reading through their literature you know typically if I was concerned about this where you need to see that full amplitude of the signal I'm usually gonna you I'm gonna use this scope that's just the bottom line now they comment in here that it is only up to 100 volts so 50 volts high 50 volts low that's the most that you can measure with this they say let's see here blah for checking data communication lines we're measuring the full range of the AC signals required yeah you know I'm not really buying it at this point it wouldn't be my first choice however that portion of it is in there so you know if you need to see the extreme peaks and valleys of the sine wave you're looking at you know you can utilize that feature if you guys use that for anything else I would be kind of curious in the comment box below what you're using that for in your diagnostic realm whether it's you know on the power probe or even on you know a regular DV om right below our PP tester we have our Hertz frequency counter so we can select that and it can display frequency Hertz and it also gives us our pulse width which is pretty nice so it gives us our time pulse width plus you know our time high in milliseconds and our time below and it displays a frequency well where can I use this so we could use this on certain Barrow sensors certain mass airflow sensors one thing I can think of on this particular vehicle which is something common relatively common that I have to check our blower motor control modules or you your resistors so this vehicle has automatic HVAC so this uses an actual you know solid state you know computer I guess we'll call it that controls the blower motor for infinite speed adjustment they typically run at a fixed duty cycle but have a varying pulse width right did I say that right I'm sorry I didn't that is completely incorrect they will have a fixed frequency and then a varying duty cycle and pulse width which kind of go hand-in-hand so yes you can have a fixed frequency so that if you got to think of it like this so your frequency of a signal is how many cycles per second it goes you know high versus low on versus off how many times you know your household current here in u.s. sixty Hertz you know that's 60 times per second your duty cycle is gonna be measured in a percentage that is the amount of on time of the signal and then your pulse width is basically instead of being a percentage value like your duty cycle it's gonna be a milliseconds value how much on time you know how much time how much you know on time high how much low that's the pulse width of your signal so pulse width and duty cycle can vary well the frequency remains fixed sometimes it's a hard concept to grasp if you're a visual learner like me it's a lot easier to understand that when you see it on a scope but let's utilize this function of it we'll go in there I'll get some kind of probe we'll see if we can find the blower motor control module should be on the open for us will hook on to it see what kind of readings we get so I turned the key on we're up under the - this is kind of nice with the little flashlight I've no idea what you guys can see hopefully let's see let me move our gherkin so you can see I have no other light in here except for this light so that's kind of Handy gotta admit we got to admit it and here is our blower motor control module I guess we'll call it we push it and somebody's got freaked out we call the wrong thing it's our board is a stir amplifier or whatever you want to call it so we have a power feed into a ground and then we should have a control wire now a lot of times these are just five volt where's I always say you gotta know your enemy I didn't look at the diagram but I'd fixed a few of these in my day so I'm gonna swap out the tip I'm gonna put a little probe up in this joint which I can't without my adapters let me go get adapter they should include this in the power probe it's a little dafter turns it in you know it's a double mailed all right we'll put that in there and now we can slip the female Sider right on and now we have a floppy little probe on the end I don't know if we have you know power and stuff till we turn the key on but we're gonna go right up into the control wire actually what we can do can you guys see the screen it's probably gonna say we could we know this system works there's no sense in going through and saying is that a powers out of ground blah blah blah so we're gonna go right to the control wire I'm pretty certain these crises or 5 volts ground switch they get pulled from high freq they get pulled from high to low in order to turn the blower motor on the longer the signal is low the wider the pulse-width is pull down low the faster the blower motor spins well what's that mean well that means if I put this in a different mode I click the button down my blower motor should come on full beans at you know 100 percent duty cycle it's just full ground you know we can't hurt it let's let me just turn the key on I already did turn the key on your ding-dong and I can kind of prove that for you I'm gonna flick back to the bolt setting and I am right it is a 5 volt signal and if I ground the sucker a blower motor nod and it did what's that tell me well it tells me my blower motors good okay and it tells me my control module is good too because it was able to take that so let's go back just for poop and laughs you're here we're gonna go back to where were we getting click happy like a banjee let's get past that never got Hertz frequency I'm gonna zoom you in so you guys can see this it's hopefully you can see that so I'm gonna take and turn on the blower motor just on low oops turn there first alright so there we are we are low and we are running at 60 Hertz now technically if I go from low to high that frequency should stay the same and it does let me get back down to low here like I say the longer the pulse-width on this type of signal because this one is looking for the ground signal the the longer it keeps it grounded will say the faster that blower motor is spinning so if you can envision what this signal would look like on a scope you know it's going to be high at 5 volts you know it's gonna be long and that's gonna dip down for 3.29 milliseconds and then go back high for 13 point oh nine milliseconds and then back down you know to ground and you just you can kind of envision what that looks like in your head now we should be able to increase speed it's time at ground is longer the speeds getting faster and we should get to a medium point where it's you know 50/50 so essentially right there we're about a 50% duty cycle it's on half the time off half the time then as we increase we should get to a point where we have no frequency because it just goes straight to ground it should be right here there we are now we're whole beans it's administrating a full ground on that kick her back a little bit like I say you can kind of draw this out in your head as we go down is that portion of it useful absolutely what else you know what else uses this on a car let's say even on this Jeep we could go out it has a hydraulic fan assembly with a pulse width modulated solenoid that controls the hydraulic fan speed under the hood the fan that cools the engine and if this was a four liter with electric fan we could use it on that Mazda's Ford's you know a lot of cars use this three wire set up pulse width modulated you know device not uncommon yeah you can use it mass airflow sensors you know barrel sensors all kinds of stuff bonus footage gonna get nerdy for a second somebody's gonna say in the comments well what if I want to read the duty cycle you have the frequency and you have the pulse width and you haven't you know unknown time so you can do the calculations even me you know big dummy I could figure this out and this is gonna make Ivan powered if you watches my video so let's probe back into this real quick this has nothing to do with the power probe it just has to do with you know whatever so I turned the blower motor on hopefully it's not wind and help my microphone here let's pick a different speed here cuz I what's gonna be 50 percent so we're off on a higher speed beyond time so when this is pulled low is eleven point three four milliseconds so we're gonna take 11.3 for what's happening 60 times a second we're going to times that by 60 we come up with a number six eighty point four we're gonna divide that by a thousand thousand milliseconds in a second then we come up with a number of you know 0.6 8:04 or 68% it shouldn't be I have our meter here where we can measure duty cycle so we're just going to cook it be calculated it should be 68 percent duty cycle look at this plugged in we're pretty close what this is saying 69% pick a different number here will lower this down it is unplugged plug it back in now we're at four point nine milliseconds pulse-width so we're gonna do four point nine we're at times that by 60 and then we're gonna divide it by 1000 and we should be about twenty nine and a half percent twenty nine to thirty percent duty cycle well plug that in and I might cook and he says twenty nine point four the duty cycle meter says twenty nine point nine all right so there's that I mean wow little bonus footage for you like I say that feature yeah that's gonna be pretty handy working on that cache what we'll do is we'll see what what modes are next so the only two modes we have left you know short of spinning it on a wheel speed signal to see they see voltage climb up like I say this wouldn't be my first tool chase for that because well let's say you have unwanted abs activation and it's due do you know a missing segment of the tone ring now you guys would say well you can visibly see that with your eyes well contraire I think I have a video doing a Jeep Patriot perhaps we're just the magnetic field was disrupted you could clearly see it on a scope but there's no way you're gonna see it with a voltmeter so at any rate we have a fuel injection test where this you know essentially use it as a noid light but it gives you a little bit more information than that and then this PP engine coolant temperature test I don't know ect so it's power probes frequency generator where they have their own device their PP ECT where it generates a tone down a signal and you can find a broken wire that's what this is for we're not going to demonstrate that actually I have that tool nevermind I think I'm almost certain I do but editing right let's just go up to the fuel injector tester now this supposedly when we hook it to the control side of an injector is going to give us the on time in milliseconds you know how long did that injector stay on you know two three milliseconds whatever it's going to shore it in kick voltage when that field collapse on that injector coil you know what's the voltage spike you know 60 70 volts it's also going to show us our injector voltage so I assume just the battery voltage going to it and then it's going to show us the ECM ground side so the transistor in the ECM when it pulls that injector to ground is that pulling it all the way to ground that could give you an idea perhaps of the driver health of the driver inside the ECM and then I believe it flickers to LEDs if I remember correctly I have not tried that function so let's plug it up instead of doing what I told you to do get a diagram see who's who we're just gonna figure out who - because we can one of these sides of the injector should be full-time power and the other one should be controllable correct correct Chrysler shut down really it's gonna have to be on in order to determine that so what I'm gonna do little Probie down right here I'm gonna probe in here and I'm gonna go back to the beginning going back to our volts DC selection here now none of these are gonna be power at this point shouldn't be anything I know hole I got nothing a little bit of tip I'm just gonna leave that in I'm gonna turn the key on see if I hear it scream it should only do it briefly well the auto shut down really turns on [Music] so that is the power side that is not the sudden want to be any so what color where's that it's a green wire so now we can plug it back up you want to be on the other wire let's put then right then yep let's back probe dear so we're gonna go in the white with a blue stripe that should be the control side from the computer he's down in there fella hopefully that's connected we can find out if it is connected simply by shutting the key back off then back on it should make an audio Bell tone there's not gonna be any voltage drop there's not going to be any current flowing through there so it should just be 12 volts in 12 volts back out we should hear a little tone because the power side testing in this moment is not affected by the resistance of the coil according to the directions so there we are so you can see how the audio Bowl tone might be a handy feature in this situation I'm gonna flick it back to feel injector test mode here there we are now theoretically we should be able to start it up and see what the injector is doing [Applause] [Music] all right cut out on a whooping sound turn the beeper off we can see we have our injector on 3.7 milliseconds to get machinery our induction pitch is about 60 volts and our injectors running this you know 13 volts and he's down there fall 2000 year ground we've got flashing blinky light yeah noise light useful data I guess for what it's worth you can see it out there under the hood you know let's say we had this in place for a you know annoyed light and I was just reaching through here cranking it you know we could use it gather our data I don't believe it saves it for us let me shut this off if it does it would be kind of helpful if you couldn't see it but it doesn't it doesn't record you know its last function before it lost voltage so yeah I mean you could use it for annoyed light does that mean the injector is flowing fuel absolutely not you know you can see that well let's say you know what we got the book right here guys might draw it out when they've drawn it out for us I know summers I mean I thought I saw yeah there it is so here's our typical injector waveform you know we've got our source voltage this is when it gets pulled to ground this is the amount of on time in milliseconds here's our inductive kick and during this portion of it this is one we can usually see the injector pintle move you know it'll be a little hump right here in the bottom portion of the graph and also if you're doing a current test on it you can see the pin hole open and then on the voltage side you can actually see that kennel closed so you can have a good pattern or a good set of data you know you can have a good power a good ground a good inductive kick and no panel movement now sure if this injector was open circuited short circuited yeah you're gonna see it with this restricted you're not gonna see it with this that's just the fact life you know at that point you know once you verified let's say circuit integrity you know yeah the circuit is good we can tell that because we tested it with the load in place yeah at that point you don't miss scope now you can do an injector drop test and see you know is this injector phone is this the cause my misfire you know and so on and so forth the other thing we can do with this tool being that we're right here get the little rubber down or up we can do we could put it in resistance mode what do they call that again feed test we put it in feed test mode and we can check tip we can check the resistance of the injector let's see here now we can you know calculate the amps and draws all that stuff let's go in here that's gonna be about 10 ohms maybe no 13 whoops you guys can't see it perhaps but it is coming up I can hold still 13 point 9 ohms so this baby draws a little under 1 amp all right and then you can go down through you know if you know the spec on your injector you can say you know that open is it shorted so yeah you can use a tool for that why not power probe this power probe is only rated for 200 volts now if they upped the ante just a little bit more on that you could use that same test for testing ignition coil on the control side you know it's time to pull down the time that's pull down its its pulse width it's its dwell time and then it's inductive kick now unfortunately the inductive kick is gonna be a tad high you know it's gonna be you know right at its threshold at 200 volts rational like it's a they up ante on that to a little bit you can also use it for ignition coil now I'm giving power probe a lot of good ideas here the last test we have to come around the power probe is what they call their advanced testing operation driver testing this is gonna be for testing like a computer-controlled Silla node so this is a lot like what we do on our channel this is where I always use a Tesla I'll take the test light you know this is assuming it's a ground side switched computer components like this you know like this purge solenoid here it's gonna be ECM controlled I believe the ECM on these controls the power and the ground side so I believe the ECM turns on to power we're gonna have to look at a diagram to be sure because we don't want to guess or maybe it's from the auto shutdown right now it's probably not we'll have to look at any rate when it wants to turn on is purge solenoid the ECM is gonna provide it the ground and it's gonna you know on this in this case it's gonna duty cycle the ground or you know go full open if it's commanded a hundred percent but either case it's gonna be ECM controlled so what I do in that scenario because I know you know that you could test the resistance of this coil and figure out how you know how many amps is this pole you know can we use our 250 milli ampere my 100 milli amp test light to substitute you know in place of the purge solenoid and turn it on so this driver test I'm here we're gonna go down and we're gonna we're gonna find that that's right there this driver test essentially it's going to do the same thing so this power is up the tip right now at the tip there is twelve point three two volts it's going to be a low amperage though so what we're going to do is you take this and you can put this in place of your computer control device you know we can see which wires our control wire we can plug this in and the advantage of having the 12 volts at the tip or the battery you know supply voltage at the tip is because some ECMs will not turn on a device if they don't see that voltage okay and you know doing it using a Tesla it's gonna be the same thing if i hook this to during power and then you know plug it in there there's no current flow so there's going to be you know no volts drop there's going to be 12 volts or battery supply voltage at the tip of my Tesla so essentially this is just like that believe it States what the spec is on it driver test 50 ohm pull up to the tip green LED in tone 1 lesson 1 volt so that's that we can let's see what's gonna be something good to use on this you would use this for example you'll see more modern cars we've done a lot of GM videos where you can have what is it a peel for 49 for the evap vent solenoid open circuit well how does it know the circuits open it's because it's looking for this voltage you know making a complete power it's going in it's going through the coil it's not being commanded on it's going back to the ECM the ECM that doesn't see that voltage it may set an open circuit code and not control that device so if you're just you know testing it with some method where you don't have power going back to the ECM ECM doesn't see it it may not want to use that bi-directional control so let me I'll tell you what just being that was personal noise right here let me grab a scan tool well we're waiting for our scan tool I'm gonna pop back into our initial testing mode here where is it here so this is our volts DC I want to see if there is indeed voltage on this at this point and there is so I was wrong this does happen for the time voltage which shouldn t turn on my machine so we do have a voltage so we can test this in in in different ways here so we know which side let's see here that's their voltage side so I'm gonna go into the control side on it I'm gonna go back into our driver test I'm gonna load up our scan tool here we're going to manually select this so I'm gonna get the information put in see if this bi-directional controls in the scan tool alright it is so we have the canister purge solenoid test I believe onto Chrysler's in the aftermarket scan tool it said the pulsing signal let's see cash per so annoyed engine must on your own ian continue now you can see we're hooked up and we're at twelve point zero five volts going into it computers not turning it on we will activate it so this and you can hear that it's activating again we should build it assuming it doesn't kick us out of this test for open circuit we should be able to stick or test light stay in place and see the same thing so it's much faster blink rate it doesn't hold it on it a hundred percent duty cycle but you can see in this case the tool did work for it of course it must take a certain amount of time at low voltage in order for it to turn on does it worked yeah would probably work better if that was or not working as well that was a little higher frequency of course you can hear the purge solenoid clicking it will turn that off so you get the idea of how that works all right now the only test mode we didn't demonstrate on it was there there you know ECT mm or PPE ect remember the acronym essentially you use it with this kit now this is a kid I bought a long time ago I don't know I think I've tried to use that was a real satisfied with it didn't forget on with it a lot at any rate you can hook this up to the battery power it has a signal generator and then it generates you just plug you know this cord into whatever wire that you want to generate the signal down and then it has a you know a cordless receiver that you can go along now I found that either how I was using it or whatever it just didn't appear to be helpful to me I've never really messed with much because typically I can find the broken wire faster than usually I could get this out but how this works with that is you hook the signal transmitter up to the circuit that you're testing and then when you stick this in its PP ECT mode it looks for the unique signal that this is putting out so if you were let's say you had a sixty pin connector at the back and you know you know another connector up here and you knew which circuit you were going after so I've got our tone generator hooked up hook battery battery plus some others it's generating a signal out this wire I have this in our PPE ECT mode now let's assume we had this hooked to a wire the back of the vo home we're up here going to this pawn through this connector to see if the signal is being sent all the way to the front well what we do is we take and we plug it in here it says not detected currently and when it detects a signal it lights up both LEDs and says detected okay where could that be useful well you're checking for a broken wire and let's say we're back at this you know whatever connector we're out at the back and there's five or six connectors along the way you know we could go to this connector do we have signal here do we have a signal here nope we lost it here you know I suppose you could use it like that like I say I don't simply because I have other test methods that I use but could it be handy sure you know I don't you know I don't see why not maybe handier than using the you know the radio frequency pickup of it I've never had really good luck for that supposed to guide in direction but again I've never given it a lot of time so perhaps perhaps it is useful I do know any time I used it it seemed to turn the entire wiring harness into a giant antenna and it seemed to be kind of fussy the distance in which you had it away from the circuit that you were tracing so like I say I think that's it folks and I think we call it quits this tool time video ended up being a whole lot longer than I thought it was gonna be but hopefully we got some value in it I know that I certainly did because not being a Power Pro before user or a power probe user in general on and beyond the you know the push button function it's kind of handy to know what this tool can do and can we use it can we trust it well the fact of the matter is I want to wait for a broken car I want to wait for a circuit we know it's bad can we use it can we make the call from it and then once we do can we use our normal test methods that we do to confirm or deny or do we use our normal test methods and say you know here's what it is you know with beyond a shadow of a doubt this wire is broken there's resistance there's corrosion there's whatever could we abuse this and come up with the same exact results definitively 100% make all that is to be determined we're gonna wait for a broken car and being that we we're cars everyday we'll give it give it give it the old college try I guess yes so we'll give it a go next broken car that comes in we'll try to use it sometimes I don't like change but you know it's worth a shot that's the only way to give a a real tool review I guess so that's that any questions comments concerns put them in the comment box below if you have experience with the power probe two three four hook whatever let me know and let me know what you think or what you found her if you've gotten burned because of you know a false positive you know let me know on that too and if you want to see more power probe videos like I said I do have the hook sit in there it's just about as clean and shiny is that one but I'm a little bit of a tool junkie so I see something new I'm like yeah let's get it and then I never use it you can't hate me for that so if perhaps you want me to go through the book on the hook let's do it and meantime I'm gonna get going home so you don't where to find us one social patron and just remember viewers if I can do it you can do it thanks for watching you

Channel: South Main Auto LLC

Views: 350,579

Keywords: power probe, power probe 3, power probe 4, tools, tool review, power, tool, probe, review, power probe review, power probe 4 review, :power probe iv, tool box, the hook, snap on tools, matco tools, how to use power probe, power probe hook, new power probe 4 unboxing, how to use a power probe, test power probe 4, power tool, power probe circuit tester, power proble iii, power probel, tool reviews, repair, snap on, matco

Id: 06q0Rm4hMMk

Length: 67min 1sec (4021 seconds)

Published: Sun May 20 2018