I Need a Good DMM... for Capacitance...

Jesse69

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I Need a Good DMM. I'm measuring newly bought capacitors from Parts Express and my $15 on sale Craftsman DMM is measuring these capacitors WAY OFF. I take a cap form the bag, and properly apply the leads to the cap and then a bad measurement - like a 1000 uF cap would register .040 nF !

Can you guy suggest a good DMM with a good capacitor measurer and that's autoranging?

Maybe a link to where to buy it would be good too.
 
I Need a Good DMM. I'm measuring newly bought capacitors from Parts Express and my $15 on sale Craftsman DMM is measuring these capacitors WAY OFF. I take a cap form the bag, and properly apply the leads to the cap and then a bad measurement - like a 1000 uF cap would register .040 nF !

Can you guy suggest a good DMM with a good capacitor measurer and that's autoranging?

Maybe a link to where to buy it would be good too.

Well, my Fluke 117 does pretty well, up to 10KuF, however, it's a bit more then $15 :)

If you're looking to test caps on a regular basis, you're better off getting a dedicated meter like modessitt suggested.
 
Im pretty sure my expensive Fluke does caps too but I still went ahead and bought an ESR meter. Check out the Tenma capacitance meter too, its cheap and does a decent job. Im pretty sure its less than 20 bucks and they put them on sale pretty often. Just be aware that its not going to scope out bad caps as well as an esr and its not autoranging.
 
Are you looking to find bad caps, or measure capacitance? My Fluke measures capacitance fine, and I'd guess most reasonable meters would as well, but that won't really help find bad caps. Typically bad caps can still have good capacitance values, but the ESR goes up. For that, you'll need an ESR meter. But an ESR meter isn't going to measure capacitance, if that's what you want.

For a good ESR meter, I've got an EDS CapAnalyzer 88 (bought used on ebay), but this one: http://www.anatekcorp.com/blueesr.htm looks to be good for the price.

DogP
 
I Need a Good DMM. I'm measuring newly bought capacitors from Parts Express and my $15 on sale Craftsman DMM is measuring these capacitors WAY OFF. I take a cap form the bag, and properly apply the leads to the cap and then a bad measurement - like a 1000 uF cap would register .040 nF !

Can you guy suggest a good DMM with a good capacitor measurer and that's autoranging?

Maybe a link to where to buy it would be good too.

MCM Electronics has a few on sale right now.

# 72-8150 Digital capacitance meter, nine ranges, comes with 9v battery, $19.99 vip price

# 72-7740 autorange multimeter/capacitance meter, $39.95 vip price

# 72-7750 autorange multimeter/capacitance meter, $49.95 vip price

Sale good through the end of January. Use "source code" (vip pricing) 18SC6 to get the sale price at checkout.
 
I don't use a capacitance meter when I repair boards. I use an ESR meter and an oscilloscope.

The scope shows where audio signals aren't passing through bad caps.

The ESR meter will show if a cap is failing and the resistance is rising. It uses a high frequency signal to measure the resistance of the cap. As the cap dries out, the resistance will rise. The failure is easy to spot with this type of meter.

As a bonus, the ESR acts as a milliohmmeter which is excellent for tracing down shorted components on circuit boards. When looking for the short, find the area with the lowest resistance.

When it's reading down to .01 ohms that makes it much easier to find a shorted monolithic cap acting as a power decoupling cap (filter) on the +12v line on the DRAM of an Apple II+. It beats desoldering all those caps one at a time to find the short! (Can you tell I've done that before?)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ESR-LOW-OHMS-ME...emQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5d27d17863

RJ
 
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I have an older version of that Anatek ESR meter and it has served me well.

RJ
 
At what ESR meter ohm reading range is a capacitor bad?

It depends on the capacitance value. High capacitance caps typically have lower ESR, while low capacitance caps typically have higher ESR. The meters usually have a graph on them to tell typical good/bad values for each cap size.

DogP
 
Capacity measurement on DVM's are worthless IMHO.

Would indeed be better to get one of the Bob Parker based ESR meters:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bobpar/esrmeter.htm

I like the Russian one Bob mentions on that page:

http://au.babelfish.yahoo.com/trans...info/esr/esr4.htm&lp=ru_en&btnTrUrl=Translate

It doesn't also measure ESR but also capacitance. It's smaller, uses LCD instead of LED (=less power needed), uses 2 lithium batteries so no replacing for YEARS and consumes almost no power. The 4.0 version has even better specs than the Bob Parker original and some more improvements.

Seems the price includes world-wide shipping, not bad. The 3.1 version is only 60 bucks, the improved 4.0 is 75 bucks.
 
I've been wanting an ESR meter for a while. I didn't know the anadtek one was only $79 for the kit! I'll be picking one up unless someone has a good idea why I should not.
 
Because the russian one is pre-built, has a lot of advantages over the blue one and is cheaper even incl. shipping...

That Russian one looks great...but I can't read half the pages because the Yahoo! translator keeps getting snagged on some kind of redirect thing.
 
I placed my order for the Russian one this morning before work but haven't recieved my payment details email yet. Looks like a pretty nice meter... can't wait to try it out.

:beerchug:
 
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