New Clamp Meter has arrived

Both zacc. The clamp meter part lets you measure current flow without breaking the circuit. Just put the 'clamp' over the wire and it measure the current flowing through it. AC clamp meters are quite cheap. DC ones (what we need) have been quite expensive. Until recently, hundreds of $. Available more recently at around $150, but the one I bought was by far the cheapest I've seen.

The multi meter part is your basic AC /CD multimeter. Very handy and necessary, but easy to buy at around $20 to $30 - even cheaper for the cheapies.

Put the two together at a good price and you have a very handy bit of kit that we can all afford.

Norm C

thanks for that norm , that would be a very handy item . i just had a look see on ebay and there seems to be cheaper ones , was there any reason why you decided for this one ?

Look closely to ensure what you are looking at is a DC clamp meter. As I said above, AC ones are cheap. DC ones have (until recently) been expensive.
Norm C

Yes :)

Well worth the cash. I'll do a proper test on it tomorrow but some quick tests I did last week indicate that for DC current measurement below about 3 amps it's not very accurate (10% ish - something to do with the Hall Effect measuring technique, I think) but over that level it improves a lot and is more than adequate for non lab work.

The other functions (volts, ohms etc) all seemed as accurate as any $50 meter ie. pretty good.

Mike Harding