EEVblog 1655 - Multimeter TIP: Discharge Capacitors using ANY meter

[EEVblog]

You can use almost any multimeter to safely discharge high voltage capacitor banks WITHOUT a LowZ function.

[David Aurora]

Yeah... nah.

I really don't feel good about this "using ANY meter" title. Or the whole idea in general to be honest.

We've all seen the ass blown out of meters that were used in the wrong modes. And whether or not they SHOULD be able to withstand it ain't the question here. There are too many different meters out there (not to mention meters that may already have damage the user isn't aware of). And then of course there's the question of what each meter tolerates when switching through functions live because whether or not people should, someone is DEFINITELY going to keep the leads connected and turn the dial. Or forget to turn it back and power something back on in ohms mode.

It'd be one thing if you had been using it as a trick to bleed off 5 or 10 volts before using an LCR meter or something, no argument there that this could be handy in a pinch, but using a few hundred volts in the demo seems like a bad suggestion to throw out there to people who might not know the potential pitfalls. In less than a minute you could have just explained the right way to do it. Or in half the time of this video you could've explained that and even gone into calculating discharge times and power ratings of bleed resistors and the whole 9 yards.

It just strikes me as bad practice overall, and given how simple it is to do it the right way I don't see a reason to reinvent the wheel on this one.

[JPortici]

Youtube gives me translated title+description, i hate that crap, i've probably unsubscribed to every channel that does that.