good morning YouTube so I wanted to show you the little modification I'm doing to this AC
panel meter this happens to be the PZ II M 0 to 1 there's the back panel for it and this mod
probably works for all of these meters they're very similar circuit boards they all have this
yellow one microfarad 270 volt pass etre and this capacitor is your capacitive dropper that
feeds the power supply for this board so you have the incoming power comes in here runs through the
capacitor then runs through this high power current limiting resistor and then underneath
here are your three point three and five volt regulators for all of the logic on the board
and the trick is you just cut the lead from the circuit board on this side of the capacitor and
that's the one that connects to the line input and then the the other side here the capacitor
and resistor are tied together but on this end you just have the capacitor and then you have the
little surface mount bleed resistor underneath or discharge resistor so what I did was I put a 470
K resistor across the capacitors by cutting this lead you're eliminating that discharge
resistor and then I just soldered a wire on to the lifted leg of this capacitor and the resistor
and I'm running this wire out through a little notch that I cut in the side of the case there
right next to the terminal block this will be my power feed for the panel meter and then on this
side is your neutral so you'll hook your line and neutral here and then the load goes out here and
back in here and then through the current shunt that's connecting those with this meet the way
to think about it here if we can look at my little diagram the way you wire this meter in is here's
my AC power supply and this is the wire that comes off of the variable output of the very act goes
to the two outlets that are on the front of the supply and then flows back to the very act but
this could be you know anything over here but the idea is you just cut the wire that's feeding your
load and you cut the wire that's coming back from the load and you just stick the meter in to those
two cut wires so your your line comes in and the meter replaces the cut with this jumper so there's
a jumper on the back of the circuit board your line comes in and then comes right back out so
this is the wire you cut you stick both cut ends into one side of the meter you go to your load you
bring your neutral wire from the load back again that this wire has been cut one goes into one side
of the sense resistor one goes into the other side and that's your your return or neutral side of the
circuit this is the one wire that was cut shoved into the two terminals this is the other wire that
was cut shoved into those two terminals and then I'm adding this fifth wire I'm cutting the wire
right here off of this big capacitor and feeding this from a separate constant power source that's
should be the simple way to wire this up and yeah I wanted to give a shout out to Jim Connor I'll
put a link to his video where he put one of these meters in his homemade variable AC power supply
and he mentioned doing this very mod I don't think he did a video on that so I wanted to do
video to show exactly what you have to do to get this to work and again this should apply to all
of these liquid crystal for reading meters there's the PZ II M o twenty one you have this o sixty one
model that I used that has the current transformer they all have very similar looking circuit boards
inside and you just have to find which of the two legs of this large capacitor here is connected
to the terminal block so I just used my meter and checked this pin with all four and I checked this
pin and it turns out this pin here is connected to these two screws on the terminal block so it's
pretty easy to find which one is connected and then you just cut that wire and run a separate
wire out the only complication of doing that is when you separate these wires here you've now
defined this wire as the line voltage and you've defined this other side here as the neutral side
of the connector if you don't separate this wire out it really doesn't matter there's you know
it's AC voltage you can call one side line and the other side neutral it really doesn't matter you've
got to make sure that you keep track of which side is which because once you do that you've made that
distinction now so you got to remember what here what you're working with so anyway big thanks
to Jim Connor for that idea and let's get this buttoned up and see if it works so if you have
any questions about that post up in the comment section below and as always thanks for watching