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Finally tried a cheap capacitor tester I was skeptical about
I was sure my $20 meter from Amazon would be junk, but it caught a bad run capacitor on a condenser unit last Tuesday that my old multimeter missed. Has anyone else had a budget tool actually surprise them like that?
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blakem8216h ago
What caught a bad run capacitor" is the part that got my attention. What kind of old multimeter were you using before that couldn't spot it? Was it just a basic voltage meter or something fancier? I'm curious if the cheap tester is using some new chip or circuit that's actually better at picking up those subtle failures. And did the bad cap show up as a dead short or just way out of spec on the tester?
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ryan_kim6314h ago
My 2004 Craftsman multimeter would show capacitance but it was always way off, like reading 45uF on a 50uF cap that was actually dead inside. @blakem82 the cheap component tester I picked up for 30 bucks uses a different measurement method that catches ESR and leakage, not just raw capacitance values. That bad run capacitor showed up as 6uF with high ESR on the tester, but my old meter still showed a somewhat believable 42uF reading.
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