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Ellen: Hey, everybody. I'm Ellen here at etrailer.com, and we're going to take a quick look at the Performance Tools digital multimeter. This is something that's really handy to have any time you're doing any kind of electrical job, or you're trying to test out any wiring, maybe do some troubleshooting with some wiring that's gone bad, you want to test out your battery, really anything along those lines. So a lot of times these are just something that's handy to have in your toolbox for any of those sort of instances.inaudible 00:00:25 about this is that it does give you a pretty big digital display that makes it easy to see what's going on. You get the leads that are about 42 inches long, so should be plenty of space, or plenty of length to get connected to whatever you want. And then there's also the included attachments that have a little alligator clamp, so that makes it easy, especially for testing out a battery without having to hold the little prongs over it the whole time.
So let's take a closer look and kind of run through some of those basic tests that you might end up doing.So here's our little guy, we've got a little kickstand at the back, makes it easy to just set this on a surface, set it on your trailer, on the floor, and we'll still be able to see what's going on. I'm going to hook up my leads here, they are color-coded so it makes it easy to remember what goes where. Got a couple little ends going over the prongs here. You'd probably end up losing these, honestly, but they do kind of help protect these. They are a little bit sharp, so if you've got these in a toolbox, it's kind of nice to have the caps just to keep them from ending up in your hand.There's also a couple of caps going over these ends, which I doubt you'll ever use, unless you're pretty meticulous about taking things apart and putting them away.
I'm just going to connect this up here. Most folks like to just keep the leads attached, makes it a little easier, so you're not having to take things apart every time. I'm going to put my alligator clamps over so we can test out our battery first. You don't have to, of course, you can just put the prongs over and it's not really too hard. You just want to make sure if you are going to use these, the inside there, this might be kind of hard to see, there's a little sleeve that that prong needs to fit into.
So just want to line that up to make sure it makes good contact all the way around.To turn this on, you just need to turn the dial away from the off position. So I'm going to turn it around to the 12 volt DC portion so I can test out my battery here. Swing those guys over and then set up my little kickstand there, and then just want to match the leads to my battery. We got red going to positive, black going a negative. And you can see our display showing what's going on there, so about 12 volts, that's what we should expect to get out of this.
Now there is a hold button, it's going to be that yellow one kind of on the left-hand side, to freeze the display at whatever it's reading out. Sometimes on other multimeters, if you press that, it'll freeze it at whatever the highest rating is. But this, it's just going to freeze it at whatever it is at the time on the screen, so that's something to keep in mind.To reset it, just press it again. I've run into this, though. I'm not a huge fan of the way this functions on these multimeters, because if you don't have it connected, maybe you don't realize that you have the hold button pressed, so if you try to go and use it, it's still at zero, and it could be a little confusing. It might make you think that there's something wrong with the multimeter, but it's just that that hold is on. So as soon as we press it again, it's going to give us our true reading, but that's just something to keep in mind there.There is another multimeter available from Performance Tools that has a little bit bigger screen, and that at least does have a little indicator to let you know when the hold is on, which I kind of like, just so that you can, if something's going on and you don't realize the hold is active, it gives you a visual cue. But again, if something's going on wrong or you're just not getting a readout, or it's not changing, press that hold button and see what happens, and that should make it pretty easy.Another common way to use this is to test out wiring functions, so if you we're to plug this in and then you want to test what each port is to make sure you get things wired up, this would be another way to do that. So you'd have current going through, and then I think usually this guy is the ground, and then you'd want to run through all the functions and test out what goes where, so that's a pretty common way to do it. It does give you pretty long lead, so it makes it easy to fit that into any kind of wiring plug and get connected to make sure that you can test things out, do your troubleshooting and what have you.So all in all, this is a pretty standard multi-meter. As I mentioned, there are other couple available here at etrailer.com. I'd say this is kind of the middle of the road one we have. Here's continuity, it does give you an audible alert. So if you want to test a fuse or something like that to make sure that there's continuity, you can use that function. It does come with instructions so that you know what all those functions are and kind of give you the tutorial of how to use it. But all in all, this one is probably the nicest, just because it is still a digital display so that makes it easy to see what's going on. But it's also pretty compact, so if you want something just a little bit smaller than the other ones, this is a pretty good option. And it does still give you those alligator clamp attachments if you want to use those to make it a little bit easier to test out something like a battery.That's pretty much all there is to it for our quick look at this digital multimeter. I hope that this has been helpful in deciding if this is the right one for you. We do have a lot of other wiring, trailer and RV accessories available here at etrailer.com, so be sure to check them out. Thanks for watching.
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