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[Highpower]

After the blower motor quit on my furnace / central air not long ago, after we replaced it I tore into the original motor to refurbish it and keep it on hand as a spare. I was testing the stator windings / insulation and my $40 Chinese insulation tester was acting let's say... peculiar. It wasn't giving me the warm and fuzzies as to it's accuracy so I just replaced it. It's the last one I'll ever buy so I went with the NIST certification. Hopefully it holds up at least as long as I do.  

   

[EdK]

Ed

[Highpower]

(07-21-2023, 11:16 PM)EdK Wrote:

Ed

Actually what sucked was TEquipment's shady handling of my order and Fluke's handling of their 75 year promotion they are running right now. I've never had a real problem with either one of them until now. I feel like they both gave me the short end of the stick this time. But I digress...
Happy with the meter but the service surrounding the sale was horrid.

[rubes]

Curious why you felt the +$100 or so for the cert is worth it for personal use? Then again, if your spending over $1k on a meter for personal use I guess that $100 is a moot point.

That certificate does not give you a more accurate calibration, just certifies that specific unit is within manufacturer specs. So another thing that sux is that you have to pay extra to guarantee compliance to those specs. I think Fluke being an industry leader you wouldn't have to worry bout that. And that cert is only valid for one year anyway.

For business I totally get it. At Honeywell everything we purchased was with certs since we had to maintain our ISO certification. So that allowed us to use the equipment in production until it got rolled into our yearly calibration cycle.

Like I said, just curious and not judging in any way. I guess I'm just too much of a cheapskate now that I'm retired, and an extra $100 for something that does not change the product in any way seems wasteful. Or maybe TEquipment does actually calibrate to tighter tolerances??

Enjoy the new toy!!!

[Highpower]

(07-22-2023, 01:18 PM)rubes Wrote: Curious why you felt the +$100 or so for the cert is worth it for personal use? Then again, if your spending over $1k on a meter for personal use I guess that $100 is a moot point.

One reason is I got a pretty good discounted price on the meter to begin with.

Quote:That certificate does not give you a more accurate calibration, just certifies that specific unit is within manufacturer specs. So another thing that sux is that you have to pay extra to guarantee compliance to those specs. I think Fluke being an industry leader you wouldn't have to worry bout that. And that cert is only valid for one year anyway.

Very true. As far as Fluke being an industry leader, that only applies to their higher end stuff now in my opinion. For the average Joe with a budget, not so reliable anymore. Test leads for example. I've gotten my fair share of garbage from them since they started producing a number of things in China.

Quote:Like I said, just curious and not judging in any way. I guess I'm just too much of a cheapskate now that I'm retired, and an extra $100 for something that does not change the product in any way seems wasteful. Or maybe TEquipment does actually calibrate to tighter tolerances??

Enjoy the new toy!!!

Wasteful, probably. As it turns out they royally screwed up my order and sent me a meter without the cert. After pulling it out of the box I took the batteries out of the meter to find they had a manufacture date in 2022. So the meter had been sitting in the box on a shelf for at least a year already. Like you said, the cert is only good for 1 year anyway and could have already drifted out of factory specs. So for my own piece of mind I sent it in just to make sure it still met factory specs when it landed in my hands. TEquipment definitely does not calibrate to tighter tolerances. They use a third party calibration lab which I'm sure meets all the standards, but they only give you "in tolerance" or "out of tolerance". No specific test data at all. My cert shows "in tolerance as received" so that's the long and short of it. At least I'll feel confident about using it.

[rubes]

Well that blows...seems you cant trust anyone anymore.
I should have taken my Fluke meter as a retirement gift when I left...hehehe

[Highpower]

(07-23-2023, 06:38 AM)rubes Wrote: I should have taken my Fluke meter as a retirement gift when I left...hehehe

I have been lucky enough to have had a few new meters given to me. One of which is a Fluke 88 kit that Toyota presented to me as part of a reward package for reaching their highest certification level for technicians. I had no idea that was coming and I had just purchased my personal Fluke 87 on my own two months prior to that.  

Still have both of them and they still work, although I have upgraded to Probe Master leads for them.

Fluke has a 75 year anniversary promotion going right now where you can pick a free item from different tiers depending on how much you spend on your purchase. In my tier they had a nice set of Fluke insulated pliers that are very well made (in Germany) that I wanted to get. After going to the web site to fill out the redemption form the pliers were grayed out so I couldn't chose them. "While supplies last."

You only get 4 items to choose from in each tier so then I picked the Fluke backpack / tool bag instead. They sent it to me and it is a joke. Made in China, very poorly constructed, hard to access, and incredibly off balance. A quick look at the reviews on Amazon shows them falling apart in the first month of use. The only thing attaching the carry handle to the top of the bag looks to be two 1/8" rivets through a single piece of fabric. The only thing attaching the plastic base to the bag fabric is a single row of stitching. A number of pics in the reviews show the base ripped off of the bag.  

I really wanted that pliers set but I guess Fluke really wants to get rid of these POS tool bags instead. So they suddenly run out of the good tools (German made pliers set) during a promotion. How convenient.