rev up your engines now a lot of people are afraid of electricity they can't see
it they don't understand it so I'm going to explain it very simply how it works
and modern cars and stuff that you can easily do yourself this is an electrical
tester it's an odd tool bt 260 cost like 49 bucks and the advantages it's got the
super a long cord on it it just keeps going and going
then it connects to the battery on your car since it's so long
you can go anywhere to test in the back of the car so you don't have to go
around looking for sources of power or having a battery-operated tool that when
a batteries go bad you got to go get batteries you're worried are they low
this connects directly your car's battery and it can work just about
anywhere speaking about your car's battery it's only 12 volts not gonna
hurt you you can put your hand on each side 12 volt does not hurt people now if
you've got a modern hybrid car or a pure electric car yeah then you're dealing
with danger stuff they can go anywhere from 200 volts to 400 volts you don't
want to mess around with that stuff without a lot of special equipment of
gloves but 12 volts is not going to hurt you the other way you can hurt yourself
would be if you had metal in your hands and that metal connected the ground
circuit to the power circuit like putting metal from the positive to
negative cable and if your hands there on a mount it's gonna get real hot and
burn you not as long as you keep don't wear rings that can shard things out
have Barenaked hands you can't hurt yourself with 12 volts and so now we're
talking about 12 volts what exactly is volt
well volt is the potential measuring of energy will check the positive terminal
as we sticking on it gives us arena which in this case is eleven point nine
twelve volts as bettors a little bit low cuz the car sits an awful lot that's
potential energy your entire car the big wires in it have 12 volts of positive
electricity the ground wire the battery which is negative electricity connects
to the frame connects to the engine in order to have
play with direct current you need a positive source and then a negative
ground so the electrons can flow you always need the entire path as I'll
show you here here's a tester I'll touch it on the engine to see if it's grounded
as you can see it's beeping and it shows green zero volts that means
it's grounded correctly it wasn't grounded correctly the alternator
I took the ground off it's got zero volt too but you see it's not green that means
it's not ground it has to be green the shelter that's grounded you touch the
ground it shows it's green and 0 that means the ground is good if you lose
either power or ground a device will work you can test it very easily with
something like this this is voltage what about amperage well amperage is the
actual current that's flowing in circuit and as we go to the fuse box here you'll
see they have numbers this is 15 now that doesn't mean 15 volts it means 15
amps and that particular 15 amp fuse is for the headlight it will allow the
headlight to take up to 15 amps of power if it takes more that's more than the
circuit is designed for and it will blow the fuse to save any damage from
occurring and just like volts you can't see amps that's all you need touch the
equipment now this cute little tester I got on Amazon for 13 bucks here's how
you can test the amperage going to any circuit it's very easy you just go to
the circuit pull the fuse up out it comes then we placed a cute little
tester in there snaps right in now this requires a special tool I like these
non-contact ones because you don't have to take anything apart it makes it a lot
easier than taking it apart when you want plug the battery and you put
testing devices in between you're resetting the computer this doesn't
reset anything all you're doing is measuring the
current that goes through all you have to do is get the tester turned on two
amps put it in the middle it will read what the draws and in this case you'll
see the current that's flowing is zero amps there's none now that's what you
want to see because in this case the headlight views the headlights
aren't turned on so let's turn the headlights on
now that the headlights on let's read the amp reading in this case it's now a
three point eight five amps which is the power the headlight is using again we'll
turn the headlights off now there are any amp brain is gone back to zero now
because the lights are turned off so these little clamp on ammeters this
particular one's about 70 bucks work great to find out what's going on in
your system if you find out that you turn the switch on and there's no
current flow you know there's no power going through the system you test the
switch you test the wiring you know for some reason there's no power going
through it for the opposite thing let's say the headlights are turned off and
when they're turned off this shows current flow that means that there's a
problem in a headlight system where they're draining electricity even with
the headlights turned off which would make your car battery drain the car
wouldn't start in the morning because it would lose power somewhere in that
system these are so great for figuring out where there's a problem and its
system now you could make one of these with pieces of wire in little clips if
you want but hey this thing was thirteen dollars and it even comes with a little
safety fuse on the side so if there was a problem rather than destroying your
car it would work just like the original fuse you pulled out it protects the
circuit okay but 13 bucks hey how about one of these just realized most modern
cars there's two different sides there's the little ones like in my
Toyota and there's the bigger ones just get the correct one for your car and I
mean you got more than one car heck you might just buy one of each like I did I
mean there are only 13 bucks apiece no as for this tester itself it really is
great because it does the readings when you push it on it does a voltage reading
all by itself but when you push the button then it sends power out and that
is what's called load testing then you're checking it under a load which
makes a big difference in electricity because even in a low voltage system
like a card to 12 volt system you can have a minor short that if you just test
the electricity by just sticking it on it might show there's 12 volts in
but it could easily be a minor short one of the connectors is corroded or loose
and then when it gets more power it will work right that's where you push that
button and it sends the full power if you read the reading if you see the
reading is 12 volts on the battery but then you check a circuit and it goes
down to way under 12 9 10 or even less then you know that system has a short
somewhere draining the electricity just tested it by pricking and then when the
circuit isn't energised much doesn't mean much when you energize it it's
called a load test and when you load test it the voltage goes down you know
there's a problem in that circuit you can use this really quickly to do it now
when I was a younger mechanic they didn't have things like this at test
sites and stuff man big meters and stuff you could use these
are much better but back then things were simpler cars didn't have computers
so everything in a car is pretty much 12 volt but realize that computers for some
reason they kind of the International Iran 5 volts my phone's 5 volts and
almost all the computer sensors on monitor cars run a 5 volt referencing
not 12 volts but 5 volts and that's who our tester like this comes in really
handy because it's Auto ranging you can see it's zero volts well this particular
one goes from 0 volts to 24 volts it'll measure them all let's say you're
testing a computer circuit and you check it it's not gonna hurt that computer
circuit because it's auto-ranging so it will show 5 volts on it if it's working
correctly now some of the older testers if you were using something where you
can act a negative to the battery and then you started testing computer
circuits it would run 12 volts through them and fry them this doesn't work that
way it's auto-ranging if you're working on a wire that's computer wire sensors
name that has 5 volts it'll show 5 volts it won't destroy it by sending 12-volt
ground to that system it will test it accurately and not wreck anything so you
don't have to worry about shorting out expensive computer systems that's a big
worry people have I know some mechanics there were excellent mechanical
mechanics water pumps engines transmissions they were great but they
were afraid of electricity they thought of I'm going to short
something don't be afraid of it with a tool like this
it's auto-ranging they'll show you the actual voltage of the system you're
working on and it won't wreck any of those sensitive computer seconds and as
long as you don't own a hybrid or a pure electric car don't worry about shorting
yourself out working on a car with one of these they are pretty much foolproof
and if you know it's not normally not a fan of plastic stuff but in this case
plastic is good because since this is all plastic
you cannot short things out you can't short power to ground because if you
have this on power and this touches ground it doesn't matter or vice versa
because it's plastic and it doesn't conduct electricity if you look closely
you'll see the only part that's metal is the very tip even if you touch this part
here to ground and this part to power it won't short out because this is painted
and insulated and has rubber and plastic coating where the only bare metal part
is the end it's a very well designed instrument and yes there's more
expensive ones out there that I've used in the past but since this one is 49
bucks and the fancy one I had was well over a hundred bucks I'm happy with this
because I've been using this one for a few years now and it hasn't broken yet
where the fancy ones that I had over the years I've been through four different
ones ten years so now if this one's still working I'll really be happy with
it but it may be made in China but it's simple technology and it's may quite
well I've dropped this thing a bunch of times and it still is I even left it out
in the rain one day forgot about it dried it with a hairdryer and it worked
perfectly fine so now that you know more about voltage and amps in modern cars
hey maybe you'll fix your car the next time has an electrical problem and since
this is a mechanic Monday I'm give it away one of these Autool testers
to have a chance to win just place a clean non offensive comment under
YouTube comments below and it will be chosen randomly by computer to be able
to test their own vehicle's electrical system
so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that Bell