today we're looking at this it's the metrel md 1160 lcd voltage and continuity tester
like a short name
so gary this must be a trip down memory lane for you with a piece of kit like this yes so
in my previous live teaching for 19 years we'd have all our students idolizing all the
kit that can go in the toolbox and i'd say to them a voltage indicator should be one of the
first things you buy well this is also a voltage indicator and a continuity tester gordon yeah now
a lot of times on the channel we obviously think there's always value in a quality tool
and obviously a quality tool that's safe is ultra important because this is a safety device and a
lot of people obviously then go off and have a look on a well-known online retailer and find
a cheaper version what we're going to show you today is obviously some of the features of this
product but some of the safety features that are really important so should we have a look at the
close look at the tool first gary let's have a closer look then right so where would you like to
start gordon okay so it's a obviously two probes one's fixed to the device itself and then you've
got this wandering lead which is up to 1.2 meters away so we've got big arms you can test a long way
apart okay yeah all these things that we're going to talk about sometimes come into something called
gs38 don't know gordon yes and i'll put a link in the description below so that's obviously a
very useful document if you're testing testing electrical systems and it's only about eight to
ten pages long so very readable as well so okay i'm looking at the scale there it says from 12
to 690 volts is that ac or dc - ac and dc right so you can see it obviously we've got this
lcd screen that shows the voltage once it's above 12 volts okay yep and obviously this bar graph
square here we've got an audible indication we've got lights on when we've got when we're using it
in this continuity mode yes and then we've got a hazard indicator which shows when we're in
uh voltage detection mode what we really want to know gordon though is has he got a torch on it and
it has that's got a torch as well so that's handy if you're working possibly in a slightly darkened
area and you want to make sure you're probing in the right place okay so when i press that button
then obviously there's a chance i put it back in my toolbox without obviously pressing it again how
long will it stay on for yeah so it'll turn for 10 seconds all right and this is a device you don't
need to switch on or off it'll it'll switch on when you need to use it so i guess the first thing
we could do is show it in a continuity mode okay so i mean i don't know it's been designed this way
but these probes when they're held together like this fit exactly as well as a british
british plug top fuse okay so ah so so we have a noise we have a noise yep uh we've got no
written on the screen but we've got the noise so that's saying we have continuity yeah continuity
so buzzer and the rx light comes on there so the fuse is good so we know that isn't the problem
so there's a drummer cable here could you do the same for that maybe we were getting a little bit
mild um testing wanted to prove a conductor wasn't broken yeah so between the two and again yeah so
we know we've got continuity on that conductor yeah so it also comes with so again this is the
gs38 part so these are your essentials for gs38 so these are your shrouds that go on the tips yeah so
they reduce obviously the length of the exposed part of the tip so obviously what you don't want
to do is short circuit your probes together okay and don't want to also have uh access to
the probe when obviously it's touching live parts as well yeah and another day another part of that
is obviously the problems themselves you see you've got these like finger guards absolutely
slip down there and and touch the probe and also some grips here so shaped or yeah as well as
the finger guards i like that yeah lots of things that come up in gs38 remember that's downloadable
in the description worth a read so where are you going to take us to next thing so you've
got a proven unit over there yeah so i've proven you well what i'd also like to prove is obviously
this is a battery powered device and obviously the batteries last quite a while because you're
not using it but if i remove the batteries all right okay so you can take those out and this is
often the thing on the you get on the cheaper ones yeah if you buy you say wander off and just think
you can buy any old one that will do the job this unit should work with no batteries in or at least
indicate a voltage okay so you're going to turn the brown so i can see them so yeah if you turn
that all around so that's good i can see so you reckon that's going to give us a voltage up to
690 volts there yeah and i can hear it uh yeah i'll get my warning so there's no batteries in it
no batteries in it but we could still say we'd if we'd gone on to a live supply we're still getting
a warning sign okay that's yeah that's yeah it's a must i would suggest so we're not relying on the
batteries okay when obviously the batteries fail or perhaps they're not present but we still get an
indicator that we're on a live supply yeah and that proven unit is a live supply folks if you
haven't seen one of those before yeah yeah it's another i guess toolbox essential that yes you go
through your journey through your electoral career yeah essential bit kit as well right okay yeah
that's a good start so we're going to now see it in action okay i think i think we flip this round
i think we look at it from a dc point of view so we said it could go from 12 volts to 690 volts ac
and dc but dc is generally the ones that gets missed out so i think we look at that next corner
so we've got a lab power supply here so we can generate some dc and hopefully see it move up the
scale here we're going to use these four mil plugs here in order that we can connect into the power
supply itself don't get confused with these being four mil and anything to do with gs38 this is the
diameter of these and nothing to do with tips so if we just pop those out we can screw them onto
the end of our probes so we can bring them in and screw them on and it will mean we'll be able to
make a really good connection in here and then i can turn up the voltage and hopefully we can see
it move up the scale so probing like so and now i'm going to wind up the voltage so here we go
so we are going i'm at eight volts dc there so we're eight volts nothing happening yet
it says it starts registering at 12 so let's see when it does start registering
so we're a little bit less than that so that's 10.2 volts our 12 volt light is lit
if we just wind it back a bit can we go a little bit lower yeah we've got there
let's get it to yeah so what we go so we're going now beyond 12 volts let's see when it flicks over
to suggest that we're at 24. there we go just there so it's slightly under where 24 volts would
be there is the 24 volts we can take it up again it will make an audible noise when we get to 50.
remember this is dc so we go audible noise kicked in at around about 40 volts
and we can take it all the way up now to the maximum of 50 volts that this can output
here so you can see now we've got our dc we went through the 12 volts the 24 and the 50 volts range
and we're measuring this in dc and we use these four mil plugs in order to make the
connection into our lab power supply so looking at the probes themselves with l2 and a positive
l1 and a negative so what we can do with our dc supply if we look at the screen here you
can also see the positive and negative so if i connect this with the positive one the positive
led will illuminate likewise with the negatives let's see that in action as well
so we're going to put this probe into the black section here which we expect to be the negative
and this probe into the red which we expect to be positive so when we go in you can see that this
probe indicates that it is the positive probe okay so that's a positive connection on the dc supply
the only way to confirm that really is to swap them over if we do swap them over we'd expect this
one when it moves to here actually to illuminate the negative one so let's pull those out
swap them over and now we go in again you can see that it's indicating that this one
is connected to the negative of the dc supply so that gives you the polarity as well
i'm sure everyone can think of a practical application for the voltage indicator when we're
looking at ac give us a practical application for the dc dc students you're probably also you've
just started an electrical course you've probably just bought and possibly passed your driving test
and got a car and you want to want to retrofit that enormous amplifier to the boot so yeah you're
gonna have to tap into the car's electrical supply so great great piece of kit for doing that it's a
double win then it gaz is telling you at college in the old days to buy one and you can also use
it for dc on your car so we've talked about ac so it's it's fundamental principles isn't it that we
have a voltage indicator to prove a circuit is live or dead what we prove yeah dead hopefully
yeah we are with the ability to it to prove that it would be live okay so should we go through that
scenario so let's use the material voltage indicator to prove a circuit is dead so the
sink of the process has already happened we've identified the circuit we've locked it off okay
we've put signs up we've seen items in the area that were using that circuit be de-energized we've
taken off the cover and we're going to prove that this socket outlet is now dead and not prove it
it's live okay maybe we'll replace it etc so we're gonna use the voltage indicator live so we need to
conform to gs38 so i'll take my shrouded tips and i'm going to screw those on and you can already
see that's nowhere near the maximum a four mil that can be allowed under gs38 so we're well under
that to pop those two on and obviously we need to prove that this voltage indicator is working
correctly and that's where the proving unit comes in so i'm going to pop it into the proving unit
and we should get it up to the 690 volts like so so we now know it's healthy and good to use
we'll now prove that this socket outlet is dead so i'm going to probe on to let's go for my neutral
and my line and i'm going to do my cpc and neutral and then i'm going to do my
cpc and my line conductor okay so we've proved that this socket outlet is dead we're still not
happy to prove that this voltage indicator is working correctly hasn't failed during
the process so in order to do that we go back into here and we're going to prove it again okay
so now we're actually happy that we've proved that that soccer outlet is dead maybe we now replace it
okay yeah so there we used it to prove a circuit was dead the gs38 kicked in there now i've had a
little look on the back there there's a lot of blurb on there and i like to throw your
bone gordon so let's have a look at some of the blurb and you can explain some of it to me again
that important safety documentation so look on the back here so you can see it's uh you read gs38 it
will reference a bs version of this european standard here which obviously means it passes
all those essential safety tests oh right okay and also the ip rating of the actual unit that's
not on here but this is rated to ip64 so yeah you could probably leave it uh leave it in your
toolbox during first fix you know when there's a lot of dust around on site and probably wouldn't
it wouldn't uh you know if you spill your coffee over it's not going to damage the unit so
probably you know better than some multimeters out there that obviously might be another option
if you're looking at this this is obviously entry-level material items and we've looked
at plenty on the channel and i'll recommend if you haven't seen those videos to go and
check those out we'll leave the links in the description below however are you considering
buying a voltage indicator are you going to be looking at the md 1160 have you used it before
and you've got some great points you want to share with the community we'd love to have all of that
feedback can you please leave those comments below and we'll try and get back to as many as we can
you