Ames CM1000A clamp meter unboxing, testing, and comparison with Fieldpiece SC680, and Fluke 902

all right guys this is a video i've been wanting to do i wanted to compare these meters the field piece to the fluke and um i saw this today and it offers a lot of the same features as this one except for power quality so i'm going to unbox this and this is the ames cm 100a 1000a i'm sorry and um i'm gonna compare hertz both in the clamp on the test leads like i can with this one but this one is limited it only starts at seven amps and this one doesn't do it at all this is the 902 i bought before they came out with the fc and i'm just going this is the 116 i'm just going to use it to i don't have a bench meter but i'm going to try to use this as a standard to test the others by except for the amps so first let's um unbox this and see what comes in it carrying case a meter i just assume there's no battery in it yet so let's open the case and see what's in there got some test leads looks like um i don't know if those tips come off or not they're turning not bad looking test leads um owner's manual and a battery so let's um set that little bit to the side and as you can see i do not have a studio i do have a shop where i could have done this but i was really wanting to pull this out the box and try to see if it's worth paying now this was just a hundred dollars this one i think these two are about 300 and this one you got to have a separate clamp meter in your bag if you're going to use the 116. so we're going to put a battery in this thing and fire it up get this little screw to the side before i lose it this does not look like it wants to come out it's a little there we go place to stick your fingernail right there before i really get into this we have a cat 3 rating at a thousand volts for the vast majority of what we do as HVAC technicians that is perfectly fine there is a cat 4 rating on that some people look for but um cat 3 for what we do is plenty first of all i'm not real sure i got power here i have opened up that power line so we can have a splitter believe it or or not um our electric stores neither one of them had a line splitter one of them didn't even know what the hell i was talking about all right it's got a nice big display let me see it looks like that's set on DC and all right that's AC I'm going to just use this to check and see if we got voltage here these have got to come off they do all right I gotta let my dog in so hold on just a second my dog put up I'm gonna save these in here that's a nice little thing to have we're gonna go back to I got set on volts first selection here is DC I think it should um automatically go to AC because that's what we test a lot more often and um I'm just gonna check for power nice big display 124 volts let's see non-contact voltage see if y'all can see this you gotta get right close to it but that works um like I said we're going to try to compare that with I hate to use the Fluke as a standard because I'll be honest I do not believe that they are the best out there very similar reading 123 let's see what about hertz 59.97 go back to this one we're going to check hertz through the leads in just a second we're going to run these and check amps and hertz through the amp meter 123 and go down here to hertz 59.96 not sure y'all can see that 59.96 hertz we're going to use this again later we're going to compare the microfarad readings but first let's do a little bit with these first of all let me see does this do non-contact voltage i do not think it does i do not see we got a hold function on the side we do not have in rush and this is the 902 like i said i don't have the 902 fc but um let me see no it does not do non-contact voltage but we're going to check voltage with it compare it to what we got on this one now um 123 exact same thing all right i'm gonna try to hold this in there and i have not used this thing for while i'm looking to see if i can get hertz on it you know i'm not even seeing it am i missing something you know volts maybe it doesn't have hertz and that's the 902 set that to the side for just a little bit now this is the one i have been using lately partially because you can measure hertz through the tip and it has power functions this although it can measure hertz through the clamp meter it does not have the power functions you have in this but honestly we don't use them all that much and for somebody who's for somebody who does not have a whole lot of money um i'm trying to see if this um harbor freight 123.9 all these are reading exactly the same i'm gonna switch this to hertz okay we got 59.97 the percentage on the top is i think that's duty cycle and if i'm not mistaken this one has duty cycle as well i just may have to figure out how use it why don't we um try and see if try and see if we can get duty cycle on it now all right it hertz and there's my duty cycle 50 is that same thing i had on the um field piece the 116 does not have duty cycle and neither does the 902 all right i want to i want to turn on one of these over here that big one draws about nine amps i'm not sure about this one but i can adjust the i can adjust a smaller one and we can i hope that's not too loud i'll try to speak up but um first i'm gonna check amps with the field piece i got 1.52 now if you notice i cannot check hertz i cannot check hertz because the amps aren't high enough there's my amps 1.52 um this will not check hertz on the amp clamp until it reaches seven amps so i'm gonna try the same same thing with this we're going to go to amps we're on amps ac ac all right we might have a failure here this is reading zero amps let's go to this one there we go i was on the wrong range apparently this is the lower range and reading 1.49 this is reading 1.52 i'm gonna go to the flute 902 1.4 1.5 see i don't have another decimal reading on that all right that was low amps 1.48 let's see if we can let's dc hold on ac 1.47 amps it is not reading hertz or duty cycle at 1.4 i hope i had that where you can see a push the hertz button it says hertz over here it's not reading it not reading duty cycle 1.47 amps i'm gonna turn this up a little bit i'll try to get closer so you can we're on amps ac this is 1.6 still no hertz still no duty cycle back to amps i know that one over there draws nine but forgive me if this is too loud almost two amps 1.99 two hertz still no hertz still no duty cycle that's reading two amps that's reading one that's reading two amps 0.02 and um we hit select that is not reading any hertz either that's not enough amps i haven't read the manual on this so i do not know how many amps we have to get up to before we can read hertz through the amp clamp i want to see about this inrush button so i've got it on amps it says relative see how do we do this relative then it goes back to auto AC I'm still going all right we're going go to this it says relative but back to 1.48 I may have to read about how to do the inrush that was it I just held it down for two three seconds zero on inrush auto inrush yeah I got it on the right setting I got zero we're gonna turn it all the way to three I still got zero we're gonna test the Fieldpiece on inrush press this button on the side it didn't read anything either all right we're going to go back to inrush I'm going to turn it all the way up nothing and the 902 does not offer inrush current I have no way to produce volts DC unless i go check my battery on the vehicle or something so i'm not even going to worry about that all right it also checks millivolts does it do it might now we got amps this is amps DC i'm not sure if it'll go low enough to measure micro amps that's something that i would have to test out on a flame sensor but um in the manual it might say this is just reading ohms this should read zero ohms took a second 0.3 okay we're on ohms 1.2 of course we're using different leads so we're going to have different results all right we're on ohms 0.19 if i had something that red here we go we'll test between here and here and we're gonna read ohms that's uh something we can read i'm reading well maybe it's open it says open lead let's try that with another one maybe because i have the switch open we have a open lead i guess we were right we have an open lead all right this that one should be powered this should be neutral and the ground maybe they're nope everything's open all right we'll do um ohms does that also testing like diodes and continuity on the same thing this one you have to press it once go back to its volts then we're going to go back to ohms on that one oh one thing i didn't test on this was a non-contact voltage it goes off just a little bit sooner than the um harbor freight one and see how it gets faster that's pretty good like i said the Fluke 902 i don't have the 902 FC i don't know if it does the same thing or not i mean if it does non-contact voltage all right we're going to take this and go to capacitance brought a 50 and 5 come on first i'm going to test it with the 116 this is coming 5.1 fan 5.12 herm 50.15 one thing i do like about this i've noticed so far is that when you plug in the voltage you don't beep constantly it is not wireless like the field piece all right we're going to do common and fan 5.086 and you should watch that because it took a little while excuse me see that there's a delay in it we're going to check herm it is accurate but there's a little bit of a delay all right we're going to compare that with the field piece which is what i've been using lately herm to fan 5.11 that also has a bit of a delay 0.5 now we're going to do to herm 50.79 so they all seem to be very close to each other i've been waiting to plug that fan up because it has i know it pulls about nine amps so maybe we can get hertz on it let's see what else we can test let's go back up to amps see it automatically went to AC that's which is what i had it when i had it out i'm on all right so it defaults back to AC which is where i set it to begin with all right now this one it might cause that fan to tip over it's got some power actually that's reading six amps i thought it was more like nine let's see if we can check hertz recycle that's gonna be hertz through the test leads just so we still don't have any hertz on this one at a thousand amps it's not even reading 6.05 so two says 6.1 6.1 to get another decimal on that point nine it matters plug that for a second um frequency i may have to read the manual to see um how many amps this test frequency um everything i've tested on it tests pretty good um it does not have temperature on it but i don't use my meter to measure temperature i have probes and stuff like that so if you if you need a meter that tests temperature um this one this one does you're going to need the um the the clamp that goes to this it's got a plug in and a clamp the 116 also measures temperature right here also you're going to need the clamp and the it's a type k adapter that goes in the plug this one has two temperature readings you just pull out your leads and switch this over and you're going to need type k thermal couple of some kind this does not read temperature let me see if i can get inrush on this because um i could not with the smaller fan we got it that time 13.79 to hold it down to get out of inrush here we are at six amps dc i'm sorry it hurts we got no duty cycle you got to go to get to your hurts i'm gonna see if this one will catch that that inrush get it on the side oh i don't have it on amps i'm sorry do not see where it all right try it again maybe i just turned it off all right let's see what my inrush is going to be doing something wrong volts amps there we go don't hold it in just push the button you think i know how to use my own meter we're able to get inrush um relative voltage in case there's a change in voltage and what you're detecting non-contact voltage hertz capacitance continuity um ohms millivolts i do not know if we can get dc let me get out of that i do not know if we can get i think millivolts is just one decimal place over let me i'm gonna put this back on ac so it'll fall to ac let me see about this light backlight gives you a flashlight and lights this up it's pretty nice it's got a place to hold your test leads i don't think this is a bad little meter it just doesn't have um you can't measure hertz unless it's probably up like seven amps like this one this one has a low range of seven amps i'll see if i can't in some future videos test this on something that's pulling more amps but sometimes as you know mini splits they don't pull hardly any amps sometimes when they're on low speed so um it'd be nice to be able to check hertz at lower amps but other than that like i said this is a cat 3 a thousand volts this is cat 3 a thousand volts cat 4 600 volts i do not see the cat rating on this here we go same thing cat 4 600 cat 3 a thousand volts true rms um it's got a lot of functions that air conditioning or even electrician technicians use and this was a hundred dollars like this was over 300 i bought this so long ago i don't even remember and this one you got to have a separate amp clamp if you're going to use it so um not too bad for the money i hope you like the video and if you like seeing tool videos and stuff related to hvac please like and subscribe thank you for watching