Why The Clamp Meter Is The Only Tester You Need | Pros and DIYers

so over the years we've made videos helping homeowners understand the basic testing equipment they need to take on electrical projects around the house safely now that consisted of pretty much these Three Amigos here of your outlet tester with the GFCI testing non-contact voltage tester and a digital multimeter that would cover 99 of anything you need to test within your home electrical system and a lot of the different appliances around the house but things have changed quite a bit and what was once a kind of Fringe piece of test equipment most diy-ers didn't jump into the clamp meter now is kind of your One-Stop shop so I would say between the outlet tester and the clamp meter that is all you need as a DIY or now you do not need a non-contact voltage tester and you do not need a digital multimeter so let me jump into some of these features we'll demo it out here on the little test rig we have and I think you're going to quickly see why this is going to cover pretty much anything you have around the house now we'll run through these features will go through the most commonly used first so a classic non-contact voltage tester we would turn that on and we'd use that testing probe to go ahead and detect that we have voltage at this electrical box and outlet that is indicated by a red light and audible alarm so now the clamp meter you can have it in any setting but what we're going to do is hold down on the ncv orange button and now you have actually a test probe at the top of the clamp so you hold down until you see EF come up on the display and now you can use that as a non-contact voltage tester now as a homeowner you're going to use that feature all the time because we want to make sure anytime we're working within the electrical box that all the power is cut to the Circuit we're working on and also there's no other circuits running through that electrical box so next most common feature starts to get into what we'd use a digital multimeter DMM for so go ahead and we'll scroll the dial over to the voltage for AC and then we're going to connect up our probes black to the common here and then red to our voltage also you'll be used for ohms when you do resistance and then for the probes if you have new probes I go ahead and I take off the category three four clamps so now I can use these probes to test an outlet now one little handy feature you do have a holder where you could press that black probe in and we'll put it in the neutral side then we'll use our red going into the hot side measuring out 117 volts so we see that we have voltage we could do the same thing across the ground making sure we have the similar 117 and we do so that's testing the ac voltage at our Outlet which is a common troubleshooting step as well around your house next up we'll do voltage DC now that is that solid line with dashes underneath voltage DC is usually bringing me out to more of an automotive application and now I'm just moving around my range so I have the decimal point in the second position so I can read out 12 point whatever it is that's what I'd be expecting on this 12 volt system for my battery when the engine is not on so measuring across the positive and negative I see I get 12.7 or 12.8 volts which indicates a healthy battery next up maybe I think my alternator isn't working correctly maybe it's not charging my battery so I would start the engine and then I would go through the same testing across the negative and positive of the battery expecting to get well over that 12.7 that would indicate my alternator is actually charging my battery and that the alternator is working correctly so we got 13.9 knowing our alternator is good now the other main functions that I use a Multimeter for this clamp meter also has it's in the continuity check and resistance check kind of the top of the dial here but first I want to jump in Let's do an application with actually using the current clamp what was once the main function of a clamp meter I use this mostly around the house in my service panel and I was using it quite a bit when I was doing sizing for a generator Inlet plug do I need 30 amps or do I need 50 amps when I only have the critical circuits in my home so I was measuring across the conductors going into each of those critical circuit breakers but also measuring across both split phases both 120 faces coming into the house to make sure I understand how many amps I pull when the critical circuits are going so that was my main use case but we can do a little test with this little space heater and measure the current and show you how it actually doesn't work a lot of people are mistaken how this clamp meter works but we'll do it properly so you can even measure appliances is at your house to get a better understanding on the loads of each of your circuits so first let me show you how this doesn't work we're not able to turn on a load like this heater turn the clamp meter to 2 to 20 amps and then clamp around your power cord that is not going to give you a reading because we have both the hot and neutral conductors going through that cord and we need these split out to get a proper reading one way to measure at the appliance is if you actually have access to the hot side conductor you could go ahead and measure across that and you can see we're reading out 9.65 amps that is what this heater is pulling if we cranked it up to high now you can see we're reading out 11.1 amps give or take now another way to measure this at the actual individual Appliance is this splitter that comes with the kit you'll see a link in the description it'll go over to our Amazon store and then under the electrical section you'll see the actual clamp meter the client tool CL 120 and Outlet tester with that GFCI test button and then also this split adapter that allows you to measure at the appliance you usually can get that for 70 or 80 dollars and it's a pretty good deal so how the split tester works is you just plug your Appliance into that it breaks out the hot side and your neutral side you'll plug that in and then you're able to turn your Appliance back on and now with the adapter it actually multiplies the current by 10 so you need to set it in the 200 to 400 range clamp around the adapter and then we know it's times 10 so we see it's reading out 97.8 amps so with a divided by 10 that would be 9.7 amps so very similar to what we saw initially going from the hot conductor so pretty cool right I mean am I the only one who's surprised on all the different features they're building in the clamp meters and to be honest it's kind of making the multimeter a little bit obsolete now you can go higher end than this here's an example of an ideal clamp meter it's a little more money it actually has two displays you can get the display on the bottom as well that will read out this also will do temperature it will do capacitance it will do frequency which are all measurements that the cl-120 from Klein Tools will not do now I like the client tools because it's a little smaller overall in its packaging and to be honest other than capacitance I wouldn't really use those other features around the house but we just touched on Resistance and continuity checks if you want to dive deeper and kind annuity checks and windows can come in handy especially tracing wires check out this video right here I'll walk you through a scenario on a condo I was redoing when I was trying to understand which Outlets were connected to each other so thanks for joining me on this video and we'll catch you on the next one take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 130,897

Keywords: how to use a clamp meter, how to use a multimeter, everyday home repairs, residential electrical basics

Id: kawFTI5-kqU

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023