Is this any good ?

X-No-Archive: yes

you can buy a multy tester for about £4 from maplins. the advantage is that you can use it also for fault testing as well.

You can get a multimeter from machine mart for a tenner, which will be far better, and allow you to do much more.

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I have no idea how one of those gizmos work. All I want to do is check the battery and alternator. Good knows what else I would need to check for basic maintenance.

It's Auto-XS branded, which means it was bought in Aldi a couple of weeks ago at half the price. Nowt wrong with most aldi gear, but that's a bit of a rip. It'll eventually come back into Aldi, but long term a multimeter is a more useful tool.

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Thats makes sense. Been doign some google reading on multimeters and how to use one. Seems straight forward enough. If I am to test the battery what output is normal ? and same question for the alternator ?

I read I can check fuses and continuity with them as well. What else car wise can I do with one ?

Also could anyone recommend one for the budding enthusiast mechanic ?

Thanks

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14.8V from a healthy car battery when the engine's running IIRC for the alternator. To test the actual health of the battery it's a case of measuring current under load - I'm not too sure on the details but it'll have been discussed here before.

IMO you want one that can measure a few amps, not necessarily for car work but a few cheap multimeters have a maximum current of 200mA which is a tenth (approx for the pedants) of what a brake light might take. Maplin do a cheapish one which I've got at home similar to this

perhaps this might be better Malc

on 17/02/2007, tishtash supposed :

That is the exact same item sold by Aldi a couple of weeks ago for £2.99 (I think) and I suspect that is where the ebay item originated.

Buy a Maplin multi-meter for less than a fiver and it will do all that the ebay item can do plus a great deal more.

tishtash brought next idea :

Fully charged good battery (engine not running) should read 12.4 to

12.8v. Start the engine and run it at 3,000 RPM voltage should rise to 13.8 to 14.4v. Put headlights, fan and etc.. on and it should still show 13.8v at 3,000RPM.

Check lamps and switches. In series with the battery and on the current, check for discharges of the battery with everything supposedly turned off.

Any of the more basic ones would be more than adequate.

Thanks for the link. It got me browsing through maplins site. I found this auto ranging one.

what do you think ?

I think you set it it and it works out the range itself, so a lot less clutter faced than a regular one. But it may take longer to get a reading. Do you think this would be more suited to my needs as its speficially for auto work ?

I've got an old Lucas "Tune-Up Analyzer" I picked up for a quid at teh car boot a few years ago. It has a tacho (rev counter), voltmeter (0-20v), ammeter (0-60A) dwell meter and points condition setting (which never seems to say anything meaningful).

I'm sure I've seen a near identical thing in the local motor factors, maybe made by Gunsons though. It's a bit pricey compared to a multimeter, and has less features, but might be better for someone new to this sort of thing.

Stuffed pretended :

The points condition was measured by simply measuring their resistance, rather pointless now we no longer have any points. Probably there would also be a dwell reading too, a measure of of much time the points spent closed, versus open as the engine ran - supposed to be a better method of setting the points gap than using feelers.