Dropped $600 on a Fluke 179 and it paid for itself in one shift

I was using a cheap $40 multimeter from Amazon for about a year on corporate jets at Teterboro. Last month I got a weird intermittent fault in a King KX 155 nav radio and my old meter was giving me jumpy readings. Bought the Fluke 179 from Grainger and found the cold solder joint on the backplane connector in under 20 minutes. Has anyone else had a tool upgrade that just made your troubleshooting way easier or did I get lucky?

2 comments

2 Comments

brianm274d ago

Man, I've got a buddy who swears by this one. He was an electrician on commercial buildings for years and used those cheapo meters from Harbor Freight. He had this issue with a VFD drive on a chiller that kept tripping out randomly. He spent like three whole days swapping parts and tracing wires with his old meter and got nowhere. One of the senior guys lent him a Fluke 87 and he found a bad capacitor in the drive control board in about thirty minutes flat. He said it was like the cheap meter was lying to him the whole time. He bought his own Fluke the next week and never looked back. That kind of tool upgrade can be a real game changer when you know what you're doing but your gear is holding you back.

parkerl333d ago

Haha that's funny you mention Harbor Freight meters. I had a buddy who used to use their multimeters for everything and swore they were "good enough." One time he was testing a thermostat on a boiler in his own house and the cheap meter told him it was getting 24 volts. He replaced the whole thermostat and it STILL didn't work. Turned out the meter was reading phantom voltage off the wires next to it. He finally borrowed a Fluke from me and saw the real voltage was like 7 volts. He threw that HF meter in the trash right then.