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My Clamp meter conundrum - Quality Clamp meter to match the cheap Uni-T 210E

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urantia:
It all started when I bought an expensive Fluke 374 Clamp meter a few years back for Solar/Battery work. It was a high quality solidly build well performing clamp meter! but it was no good for measuring smaller voltages with a resolution of .1V (Ie measuring LFP battery cells to see how much balance they are out from each other). 

So that got me searching for a clamp meter with higher count/higher resolution voltage readings which lead me to the Uni-T 210 E with hacked firmware to extend its capabilities. to 6000 counts so I could read battery cell voltages with much higher precision (eg 3.554V vs the fluke 3.6V).

Excellent! job done I can rest easy now, except no im unable to rest easy. The quality of this UNI-T clamp meter is terrible. And gets worse with age, ie it turns off anytime you open the clamp meter, the accuracy is questionable even though it has extra digits of resolution. The quality in the hand feels cheap (which it is). Try out the Jaycar clamp meter, another cheap and nasty unit that has become useless at measuring current.

And so now I have opened up a can of worms trying to find both a quality Clamp meter with at least the capabilities and display resolution of the cheap Uni-T. But seems there are not so many options. I could just carry 2 multimeters (The fluke clamp meter, and a Bryman for voltage readings/everything else), but I really don't see why there is nothing that matches the Uni-T in features but of decent quality so i only need to carry the one meter.

So far only the Hioki CM4375 seems to match the criteria. But hopefully some of you out there can suggest some other worthy clamp meters?


PS I have a Fluke 374 and also a Flir CM46 available for a good price as they don't suit my use case above!

boggis the cat:
You could see if the CEM DT-339 would work for you, as a cheaper option:
https://www.cem-instruments.in/pdf/DT-339.pdf

J-R:
Check out the UEi DL3x9 series (4,000 count) or the DL5x9 series (6,000 count).  But not the DL569.
https://www.ueitest.com/ECommerce/category/products/clamp-meters/meters#p-1

I have the DL599 and overall it's a pretty sweet machine, despite some minor annoyances such as the slightly awkward carrying case and yellow! COM jack.  I just tested it with an input signal of 3.45600V and it read 3.455V.  So pretty good there, at least on my unit.  Side note, it won't auto-range to mV, you have to manually select that range.

BeBuLamar:
I never use the clamp meter to measure voltage. I have a couple of the 374 and have used the 374, 375, 376 and they are good but I always find that the resolution of 0.1A isn't good enough for me at times. Even Fluke cheaper clamp like the 325 has better resolution in the current measurement.

Kleinstein:
If reading small voltages is the main problem with the Fluke meter, just get a cheap second meter for voltage readings.

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