Quick Capacitance Testing Help

A learning, amateur electrician, Brad G.

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Are you trying to test them in the circuit ? If so the meter usually will not work. You will have to remove atleast one lead of the capacitor from the circuit to test it. This is often the case of many components. If it is a digital meter you may be able to test some components in the circuit, but not usually the capacitors.

Yeah, it's a digital meter. According to the manual, it's supposed to be able to do in-circuit testing for capacitance. It grants that you'll get a more accurate result if the capacitor is out of the circuit, but right now I'm just aiming for getting a result at all. Thanks once again

If you're checking electrolytics, they may still hold a charge, which may affect readings.

Keep in mind that the meter (unless it is out of the ordinary) is only going to let you measure capacitance. And that will be affected by the parallel components in the circuit. Maybe more important, many capacitors will fail in other ways before their capacitance changes. Especially electrolytics, where the failure often comes from rising internal resistance, so they just can't do their job right. They may show the proper value on the capacitance meter, but just can't do the work. A different kind of meter, an esr meter, is used for that sort of thing (and I gather is often the first thing used when troubleshooting where time is money); it tests to make sure the internal resistance of the capacitor has not gone up greatly.

Michael

news:sci.electronics.repair is a better place to ask for help repairing something. Electrolytics need to be tested for ESR, which takes different equipment..