rev up your engines, today I'm gonna show you the many uses of a multimeter when
fixing your car, and as usual I'm gonna show you how to save money doing it
now you don't want to buy the cheap piece of junk, that is gonna break when
you're using the meter and you don't want to buy the super expensive one that
you don't need, so here's what I've discovered, now just their kicks I got
this at autozone it was like eighteen dollars, then I got this blue
driver that's forty nine dollars it's much more professional and I also have
this fluke, it is an excellent meter I use it all the time as a professional
mechanic, but it costs five hundred and fifty dollars, for $49 this blue driver
does quite a bit of things that does five hundred and fifty dollar one does,
so you might think about this, because the cheap ones hey they're really light
they're not fused that well inside, you start messing with amps and stuff
these things can easily melt, but a quality unit like this, hey it seems to
work quite well and it does a whole bunch of things since it's an automotive
tester when you're working on your car, where the fluke a professional
electricians use these, if you're not messing with alternating electricity
houses, construction stuff, you really don't need something as solid duty is
this, now with the insane use of electronics on modern cars you really
need a good beater if you're gonna be working on any serious electrical
problems, now the first thing I like about this blue driver meter is that
it's auto-ranging, you don't have to keep clicking it to
guess how many amps or how many volts just put it on amps or volts and
automatically ranges and give you the correct reading, you can see on a cheaper
meter you got a guess how many voltage you're measuring or how many amps and a
lot of times you might have the decimal point off, so you might actually have 12
volts but it'll say 1.2 and it gets confusing an auto-ranging 1 is the way
to go, let's say they want to check the battery, just plug in the leads positive
and negative go to the battery and touch it, and here we have 12.64 volts
it's that simple to check stuff, now let's say you want to measure the amp
draw of an electric fan to see if it's good or bad if it's starting to go out
this works great, you just push it on amps in this case it's 20 amp
DC and here's the amperage this is the low-speed fan this is a multi-speed fan
the low speeds only taking 0.44 of an amp, so it's fine it's not draining too much
if the amperage is too high that means that the motors just taking too much
energy because it's burning itself out and it needs a one, you can check all kinds of
stuff with an amp meter once they have power on them, now another handy thing
this tool has is it's got a contact thermometer for measuring temperatures
as you can see even though it's early in the morning in Houston I'm sweating
because it's eighty six point nine it's like ninety nine percent humidity, you
hook the temperature probe up to the tool, then stick it in your vent and turn on
the AC, you can check the various vents to see if there's a temperature
difference in them and really, temperature is a relative thing, it's not to this
machine it measures it absolutely, so you can know if it's really working right or
not, and in this case we have a 25 year old Toyota that's putting out 53 degree
air when it's 90 degrees outside, so that's pretty decent, you can even stick
in the exhaust and measure the exhaust gas temperature, to see if the exhaust is
getting too hot and you might have a problem with the catalytic converter, and
if you have cool tools like this es load Pro, that load circuits to find shorts it
plugs right into this meter, realize if there's a load Pro cost about
twice as much as the meter itself, but you know being a mechanic I've got all
this stuff lying around, so I can use all my good tools on this too, that have
universal connectors, you can even connect non-contact meters to it to
see if you have any kind of parasitic drain on your battery, it's got all kinds
of different things you can do, you could spend a week learning how to use every
single one of them, it's even got a built-in rpm tachometer, if you're
working on your car and you don't have a tach on the car, you can hook this
up to read that too, it does all kinds of stuff for 49 bucks, because let's face it
cars are going electronic and you can't see electricity, you gotta have a meter
in order to understand what's happening with electricity, you can't just guess
when I was young mechanic, we would guess on stuff all the time because cars are
pretty simple, but today there's so much computer stuff and you gotta have a
digital meter and a good one, in order to work on those things, anything that'll go
for a millivolt to higher amperage ones if you're working
on an alternator, but as a warning for those who might own a hybrid car I want
to work on those electronics, you can't use this one, you can't even use my
five hundred and fifty dollar one for a lot of that stuff, the hybrid ones
because they use really low power electricity for some of the stuff and
really high power stuff for the other, you need a gauge that cost well over
fifteen hundred dollars, because they're going for mili mili amps and then
they're going for mega amps, so you need something that's super expensive plus
you really don't want to work on a hybrid car unless you're a professional
electrician or a mechanic that's trained on them, because you can kill yourself
that high voltage you have to get voltage free gloves and check them
before you put it on, so it doesn't work to the glove and electrocute, that stuff
that's better left to pros, now since this is mechanic Monday I'm giving away
one of these blue driver multimeters to have a chance to win, just place a clean
non offensive comment on the youtube comments below, and the winner will be
chosen randomly by computer to get this nice multimeter for working on their own
car, you can also use it on your house too I've done that, because it will work
between 750 and a thousand volts too, so most houses never go over 240 volts,
so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember
to ring that Bell!