Always thought multimeters were overkill til mine caught a hidden short last Tuesday

I been using a basic voltage tester for years on fridge repairs and figured a multimeter was just extra steps. Then I was chasing a no-cool call on a Whirlpool side-by-side in Denver that kept tripping the breaker after an hour of runtime. Took me 45 minutes to find the tiny short in the defrost heater harness because my tester couldn't show resistance variance - anyone else switched tools after something like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

scott.grace3h agoMost Upvoted

That 8 ohm difference is exactly what bit me too, @matthewg63. I spent a whole Saturday last winter on a Frigidaire in Aurora where the defrost heater measured fine cold but opened up after a few cycles, and my old beeper would have told me it was fine until I actually swapped the harness and saw the discoloration. My wife laughed when I came home with a Klein MM400, but after that experience I told her she can laugh at my meter but not my repair times. It's funny how a cheap tool has you chasing your tail for hours, but a decent $80 Fluke or Klein pays for itself on the first job where you catch that cracked element before it turns into a burned up control board.

matthewg6318h ago

You had the defrost heater get chewed up by the ice maker arm or something? I switched to a Fluke 115 after a similar runaround on a GE freezer where a pinhole in the copper had me chasing ghost leaks for two hours. The resistance check is what got me too - a regular tester just shows continuity or not, but a multimeter catches that 8 ohm difference telling you the heater element is cracked but not all the way open. Now I keep the meter in my pocket for any defrost timer or thermistor call, saves guessing when the part is acting up at 34 degrees but not at room temp.