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Traded my Fluke for a cheap multimeter, lost 3 hours and $40 in fuses
I bought a $25 no-name multimeter off Amazon because my old Fluke finally died and I figured a basic meter for basic work was fine. First use on a crank no start, it gave me a voltage reading that was off by almost 2 volts, sent me chasing a wiring issue that didn't exist. Turns out the internal shunt was drifting after 20 minutes of use, completely useless for anything with a computer. I spent the $85 on a proper replacement the next day. Has anyone else had a cheap meter waste their time like this, or am I the only one dumb enough to trust the reviews?
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the_william20d ago
Man, I had the exact same deal happen with a $30 Craftsman meter I grabbed in a pinch. The damn thing read battery voltage at 12.9 when my Snap-On said 12.4, and I chased a bad alternator for two days that was perfectly fine. What really got me was the resistance readings jumped around by 2-3 ohms just from me breathing on the leads. I finally bit the bullet and got another Fluke last month, and I tell everyone now, you don't buy a meter for the 99% of the time it works, you buy it for the 1% of the time it has to be right. Cheap meters are fine for checking if a lightbulb works, but anything with a computer, forget it. Honestly, the reviews on those things are probably fake half the time anyway.
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