AnswerID: 176370 Submitted: Friday, Jun 02, 2006 at 15:08
Mike Harding
replied:
Sounds like a bargain.
A couple of words of caution on these very cheap meters: most of them are NOT rated to measure the 240V mains and usually clearly say so (I don't know anything specifically about the Bunnings one) but exercise care in this area.
They tend to go out of calibration easily so from time-to-time check their DC voltage scale on a new AA cell (should read about 1.55V) and your 12V car battery when the engine has been switched off for a few hours (should read, unsurprisingly :) about 12.5V).
On the Ohms range when the leads are connected together it should read less than 2 ohms, ideally less than 1 ohm.
As, at last count, I had nine multimeters (including an Avo 8) I'll give this one a miss :)
Mike Harding
Reply 4 of 8
FollowupID: 432433 Submitted:
Friday, Jun 02, 2006 at 17:13
Mike Harding posted:
It sure is. And still gets regular use - whenever I mistrust my expensive digital meter or think it's not showing me a trend out comes the Avo and it still does a damn good job.
A year or two back I was up in the High Country using my Amateur Radio set to transmit and was monitoring the 12V battery with a cheap digital when I noticed the battery had fallen to 7 volts "That's stuffed the battery" I thought until I realised that if the battery _really_ was at 7V the radio would have stopped working long ago and, sure enough, the battery was fine but the RF transmission was getting into the digital meter and causing all sorts of problems - the Avo would have told me the truth :)
Mike Harding
FollowUp 4 of 7
