The True Cost Of Multimeters

If you are building a home shop, it is common to try to get the cheapest gear you can possibly get. However, professionals often look at TCO or total cost of ownership. Buying a cheap car, for example, can cost more in the long run compared to buying an expensive car that requires less maintenance. Most consumers will nod sagely and think of ink jet printers. That $20 printer with the $80 cartridges might not be such a deal after all. [JohnAudioTech] bought a few cheap multimeters and now has problems with each of them. Maybe that $120 meter isn’t such a bad deal, after all.

The problems he’s seen are the same ones we’ve all seen: noisy selector switches, suspect display readings, and worn off lettering. You can see the whole story in the video below.

Although we get that [John] has $90 worth of meters that are not so great, we wish he’d given us an idea of one that he used that he did like. If you shop, though, you can get one really good meter for the cost of the three meters in the video and some of those will reliably last for decades.

There are cheaper meters, of course (with strange connections to felines). You can even get a Fluke meter for less than you might think.