Testing Meters.

[worth1]

Decided to start posting in this section after a long time.
Didn't know where to start.
Will probably look back in a day or two and wonder what was on my mind for doing it but here it is anyway.
You simply cant mess with electricity to much extent without some sort of test equipment.
A good meter is a must.
At the very least a voltage tester to see if a circuit is energized or not.
I use mine for everything.
I am a professional so I have to have the best I can get, my life and work depend on it.
I own a Fluke meter and it is all I will ever own.
My last one worked for 20 years before it just fell apart from old age.
The rest of the young guys at work have what I would call cheap ones.
The electricians have cheap ones.
They look at my fluke in awe and wonder how I can afford one.
They pay 40 dollars for a meter where I will pay 250 dollars or so for a kit that comes with a pouch another amp tester and a nice strap with a super magnet on it to hang it from places.
Also nice leads.
I have seen the cheap meters last from 6 months to maybe a year.
They make fun of me sometimes for spending the money I spend on a meter.'
They say but mine only costs 40 dollars.
I say and yest you end up buying one every year or more.
Mine will last a very long time my last one 20 years.
At today's prices at that rate you will have payed 800 dollars or more for meters.
The other thing is they pay so little for them they dont care if they break or lose them.
I on the other hand will go ballistic if someone mishandle my meter.
One guy got his cheap meter stolen and hasn't replaced it.
He is a foreman on the job.
He needs a meter.
I went there to help him on the job and he had the audacity to ask if I would leave my meter and toner there so he could use them.
I didn't catch myself and replied are you $%^%$ kidding me, laughed and said go buy your own meter and got in my truck.
It isn't like they dont make the money they just dont have their priorities right.
They will come to work on a Monday and brag about wasting money on some rot and not buy the tools including meters to work with.
Years ago my old company supplied meters but with today's workers not giving a hoot about another mans tools I dont blame them for not.
I worked union electrician for awhile and they required you to have tools.
They had a list, the higher up you were the more tools you had to have.
Not one time did they require you to have power tools the company supplied them.
So anyway I think you all get the point and my speech is over.
Soon I will dedicate this section to meters and the use of them because I have had one hell of a time getting folks to use them right.
Even that foreman that wanted to use mine.

[worth1]

The next thing I am going to post is a very good video on electricity.
When I was a kid even in grade school my room used to have all manner of strange smells the occasional fire and lord knows what coming out of it from experiments.
My bedroom had wires strung out everywhere.

[matereater]

I never scrimp on quality tools, they pay for themselves over the years !

[matereater]

I still have an old Simpson 260 meter I used when I was in the Navy, its the ole analog style. not as quick as the newer ones these days but you cant beat the accuracy

[worth1]

The Simpsons are still used on the bench a lot.
One thing I found out with the auto range on the Flukes and others is testing for a resistor at the end of a pair of wires.
Our speaker circuits have a shield and a drain wire in them.
This is to capture and eliminate noise on the speaker.
Many times the induced voltage on that wire will mess up reading for that resistor on auto range.
So I have to put it on manual and the resistor will show up.
I have ran across several people that thought their meter was broken or were looking for a break in the wire because they couldn't read the resistor.
What is worse the closer you get to the end of line resistor it will start to show up.
Then you are chasing a ghost trying to find something that isn't there.
It happened to me because someone put the wires for the circuits on the wrong contact screws on the amplifier.
That was the trouble not the resistor.
I didn't know it until I got to looking at the installation terminal chart.
The resistor is there to supervise the circuit so if the line has an open the amplifier will go into trouble.
This is for fire alarm voice evacuation and is part of the code.
About the time they were ready to take the thing down and get another one the troubles went away.
What did you do they asked.
I put the wires on the right terminals.
WHAT????
Yeah you landed the wires on the A side not the B side.
The A side is for if you want to run the wires back to the amplifier for a class A circuit with no resistor at the end.
4 hours in the middle of the night looking for nothing, a so called snipe hunt.

[worth1]

Someone sent me this picture yesterday.
This is an example of no one having any idea what they are doing.
The white wire on the bottom doesn't belong there.
The wires on top you only need the red wire.
They have left no place for our control wire at all.
To make it worse these people are in charge.
None of them have a meter and have no idea how to use it if they did.
The head electrician did the top wires.

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