While in my search for new multimeters for our repair café, I came by this fantastic resource. We had previously bought a couple of Aneng AN8008 because EEVBlog recommended them. I was informed that this was not the best multimeter for all applications, so I tried to find something that would be 100% safe to use in the repair café.
This guide compares price, safety and functions in an easy way. There is a complete teardown of all the multimeters and pictures for each step. This is by far the best resource I have found for DMMs.
Very useful reference - thank you! I’ve put a link to it on the How to use a Multimeter page in the Wiki. I note however that there are unfortunately no reviews later than 2020. Also it doesn’t have a column for autoranging - some people like it, some don’t.
What it says about safety is important, especially for a multimeter to be used by volunteers at a repair event, but that said, I can’t remember the last time I had to use a mutimeter on mains. For the live side of almost anything, whether a switch mode power suppy or a table lamp, continuity or resistance and diode tests will nearly always tell you what you need to know
What a great resource, I would have liked to see a score against each.
I have been using the same Fluke 73 for 20 years or so. I have used many other DMM’s, portable and bench, cheap and high-end but would be hard pressed to move away from Fluke for my ££.
Philip is spot on regarding diode checking for mains devices. The first thing I do when I get a 240v device on the bench is use the meter to check continuity, resistance and shorts. For example I fixed a friends toaster with just my meter last week. She complained it was tripping the house breaker. I checked with the meter and could see the elements resistance (60ohm I think?) when the mechanism was engaged. I then inspected and could see one of the grills was not coming forward and was very close to the heater wire. I diagnosed that when the wire was heating up it was flexing and shorting to the grill. I manually checked this and indeed the meter bleeped as the plug showed short. I released the stuck grill and completed the fix. All with the meter.
As a user, restorer and collector of multimeters for over sixty years, whilst I acknowledge that DMMs seem to have become dominant nowadays, an analogue multimeter is far more useful in many instances when fault-finding in electronics, particularly when intermittent faults are present.
DMMs also tend to confuse newcomers. Some DMMs display different messages, such as “1” or “OL” or “- - - -” and/or ‘beep’ when over-range, particularly on the resistance ranges, and for the inexperienced it can become hard to distinguish an open-circuit from a short-circuit.
All multimeters of whatever type need the operator to possess a certain basic level of understanding and knowledge in order to interpret the readings.
I thought “I’ll get one” particularly for the capacitance and Hz ranges, but all the AN101s available to order here in the UK now seem to have neither capacitance nor frequency ranges. Thus it offers no functions that my existing DMMs don’t already possess.
@stephen_adams Thank you very much for that link! I’ve ordered one, as the spec clearly confirms the presence of capacitance and frequency ranges. There are clearly several versions of this meter out there.
Maplin “Precision Gold” was my first DMM - the ubiquitous ICL7016 chip. Was indeed OK but the three position off/DC/AC slider switch was frustratingly dodgy.
9V batteries are a pain, but the upside is that you get a higher diode test voltage, which works with LEDs. My current Brymen uses AAAs and has this issue.
In our repair café we have a bunch of Fluke multimeters, but the 3 we have are not always enough. We bought a couple of Aneng AN8008 which were review on EEVBlog as a good bang for the buck model.
One of our volunteers raised a question about the safety, if people use this model for AC. And as we can see on the DMM Review I shared, this is also what the reviewer said about this specific model: https://lygte-info.dk/review/DMMAnengAN8008%20UK.html
Instead we plan to buy a couple of UNI-T UT139C, which seems to have the best balance between price, safety and functions.
In the most recent repair café initiative I had to shop for, our budget was crazy low. For 1.300€ you can make a well equipped repair café, but this time around the budget was only 350€. Therefore I had to get the cheapest equipment, which were still realiable and safe to use.
After having searched around in the “buying guide” from the first post, I concluded that all UNI-T products are rated excellent in terms of safety. Therefore I tried to find some models, which were not listed in the guide, but would still be very cheap.
Here are some examples:
13 € - UNI-T UT33A+
17,5 € - UNI-T UT133A (The one we got)
20 € - UNI-T UT136C+
All models have auto-range as well as removable probes which is a must in a repair café. There are a ton of different models, so find the version which meets your needs in your market. I trust these better with 230V than other cheap multimeters.
