Alrighty, how you guys doing? This is George. Just going to give you a quick overview here
on a two for Tuesday video. We're here at the workbench and I want to talk about testing equipment.
Specifically I want to talk about how you know when you got the right wire and how you know what
your amperage load of your particular system is and give you a hands-on review on both of these
products. These are the two that I use most often, pardon me, in the shop
and these are the two that we're gonna bulk buy here to pass on to you guys as far as
usage in the shop. Let me open them up and show you what we got inside. Alrighty, so once opened up,
here's what you get. You're going to get your nice test light. Now this is kind of a basic test light
but it is a computer safe test light meaning it is not going to screw up your car the way some of
the older generation light bulb test lights will. So if you're not using a computer safe test light,
you need to okay because all these cars have computers now. The other thing, this meter, well
of course it's computer safe because this is a little different meter. This is just a
LCD display. This tool here basically reads only. Can never really damage anything with this.
You'd be hard-pressed to try to damage something with this.
So let's talk about it one at a time. In the test light box, you're gonna get an owner's manual from
the manufacturer. You're gonna get a little VIP card for extra warranty if you want, totally up
to you. I don't know if I've ever turned a warranty in on a test light but here's what you're gonna
get. It's a nice test light. It's quality. It's got a nice display on it. Goes three to forty eight volts.
I like it because it's backlit and let me show you what I mean by that.
So I'm just going to go ahead and hook our ground up to our test bench ground right?
So we have our our good ground right here. Now you'd be hooking that ground anywhere
on a regular car if you wanted and then I'm gonna- sorry, as I kick the camera I'm going to
go ahead and hook up positive right here and I'm going to show you what I mean by backlit because
sometimes those dashboards be dark. Sometimes you're down in a corner and you can't see
and it'd be nice if it lit up like that. So this one does. It's got a nice soft blue back light on
it. Tells me 13.8. That's what my test bench runs at normally. You can see when it goes off- 14.1, got a
little spike there when I turned it off. So anyways, let's see if I can do that again. 14.2.
Anyways, that's what you're gonna get and I like this because it tells you positive voltage. Okay,
if you end up hooking it up backwards like you found a ground instead, you can see it basically
does nothing. So it's only going to pick up on your power. Okay and it's going to display for you your
voltage right there. 13.8. This is especially useful for determining if you have a battery voltage, a
full 12.8-12.6 voltage on your lights. When you're trying to find particularly for our Auto Flasher,
you can go ahead and look specifically at the voltage and you could find out if it's
a 5 volt or if you're only getting 9 volts or if when, for instance, your vehicle's in park
and your DRL lights are on, is it full battery voltage or not. So I like this meter. It's very easy.
Very quick. Nice little grabber there. So that's the test light that we offer for you. If you don't have
one, check it out at wickedwarnings.com. I'm going to talk to you now about this meter right here
and why this one here is so very important. Let's take it out of the bag, take a look at it.
Oh man is that nice. Look at that. Oh, should I take this off? Should I take it off? No because
that's up to you when you buy it. Alright, so I like this one because it is a clamp on induction
ammeter meaning when you want to know how much current is going through this wire, 10 amps, 100
amps, you can clip over and you can check the current running through the wire. I use this on
every single build I ever do and the reason being is I'll take it to the end here and I'll set it up.
Hear it beeping? It's starting to work there. Sorry I'm getting a little shadow here. I apologize
about that. So I set it up and the first thing I'll do is I'll choose whether it's a 2 amp
load or a 20 amp load. I can kind of guestimate on that usually. I'm using the 20 amp unless it's a
single light, we'll go down to 2 amp. Okay and then you can see the first thing it says is terms AC.
We're going to want to go ahead and select once and now it turns it to terms
DC. Okay, now you can see some residual voltage there, .1. We can go ahead and re-zero
by pressing the zero and that will zero it out. Now any wire we put in here with current
flowing through it will show up on this meter and if you have a high voltage current, like
I checked one truck one time and it came up that it was drawing 29 amps for a couple of LEDs
because the wire had been pinched by somebody who installed a toolbox. The wire had been
pinched to ground. It was hooked up to a factory auxiliary on a Ford Super Duty which was fused at
40 amps and it was pulling 29 amps and it was actually burning the wire from the short
backwards and melting and causing a fire. So I was able to verify that and when I found the high
voltage, I hit hold and I took a picture of it and I basically sent it to the client and said
this is your problem right here. This wire should not be drawing anywhere near 29 amps and this is
why we're having melting problems. He thought maybe the lights were to blame. Then I isolated it back
to the short circuit, corrected the short circuit, the amperage draw dropped down to about 1.5
and the lights worked perfect. So he did not need new lights, he did not need new wires, he needed a
repair and it took this for me to easily find it. So that's that's what I like to use this for.
Let me show you a little demo. Okay, so we just got a steady burn light here. This is just a trailer
light we had laying around the shop. No biggie. We're gonna go ahead and hook that up to ground.
I'm gonna go ahead and hook it up to power. Oh it's backwards on trailer lights. My bad. Let me fix that.
You think the ring terminal would have told me that right? No. Alright, so here we got just a
regular old trailer light right. Say this was part of your- say this is part of your system and you were
like, well how many amps is that drawing. That's one light, so I'm just going to go ahead and click
this down to two. That's going to move the decimal point right here to there and it's already pretty
much zeroed. It's on AC again because we moved it. So we're gonna hit select, we're gonna go to DC,
we're gonna re-zero it and now, we're gonna go ahead and pop right over to power wire
for that light and as you can see, 0.11 amp. So now when I take that power wire off
out of the clamp, goes down to nothing. So we can tell that this light is drawing 0.109, .11 amp. Okay,
very very useful to know what size fuse do I put on my 1, 2, 20 LEDs. What do I fuse my main wire on
anyways? Well set your system up, check your draw. We're at 0.11. I would say that this light, if it
was alone would need a 2 amp fuse and that would be more than enough. Now this also comes with wires,
wires that plug in down here and what that does is it turns it into a volt ohmmeter as well. You
can do voltage here. It'll check AC voltage or DC voltage. You can also check your ohms of resistance
if you want ohm out something to check if there's continuous continuity between a
wire. If you're not sure how to use ohms and how to check for continuity, google that. It's real easy.
I don't use it very often but once in a while it's great to have and then here of course we have our
2, 20, and 100 amps and then we have a near contact voltage as well. The near contact voltage,
I don't use. That's where you can like just kind of get near a wire. I don't really like it. I like
the clamp. That's my style. Clamp over the wire make sure you have only the wire you're measuring
in here and that's it. Of course, it has an auto off if you forget to turn it off because
I've forgotten to turn mine off many times and trust me, it'll go off by itself. So here's
your little bit more expensive all-around meter that I love and use nine times out of ten. Here's
your everyday grab it test light that I also love and I use very frequently as well. So both of those
tools are what I use here in the shop on a regular basis. I hope you can use these as well to get the
solutions and the jobs done that you want to do and they're both available right here on Wicked
Warnings. Any questions or comments, give me a holler. Email in. We'll try to get you squared away.
So I wanted to do a hands-on on these two products so y'all can see exactly what you're getting
and exactly how it works and hopefully you enjoyed this video. Thanks again for watching
Wicked Warnings, your number one source for construction and emergency safety strobe lighting equipment for
cars, vans, buses, trucks, bicycles, tricycles, everything in between located right here in
the suburbs of Chicago Illinois. So make sure you check us out at wickedwarnings.com. Drop an email
in at info, info@wickedwarnings.com or stop by the shop. We'd like to see you. See on the next video.