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I used a cheap harbor freight multimeter to find a weird ground fault in a 1970s house
Everyone says you need a Fluke for real troubleshooting, but my $20 Cen-Tech found a floating neutral on a kitchen circuit that was backfeeding through the plumbing. The reading was jumping between 40 and 60 volts on a cold water pipe. I traced it to a junction box behind the fridge where the old cloth wire had corroded. Has anyone else had a weird fault show up on a pipe like that?
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ninasanchez17h ago
My uncle's 1980s house had voltage on the gas line from a bad dryer outlet. The cheap meter I borrowed just showed "OL" overload, but my cousin's Fluke actually gave a stable reading so we could find it. Sometimes the budget tools just don't pick up the weird stuff. I'd trust a random voltage reading more on a known good meter.
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the_jennifer16h agoTop Commenter
Yeah, my cheap meter just shows "OL" for everything, including my own bad decisions.
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