 You wanted to talk about meter safety, so let's talk about meter safety. Let me tell you a story. Actually, let's talk about a couple of things first. When dealing with the meter, let me show you, I've got two meters. These are the two meters I use when I go out on site. I've got my Fluke 87.3, I love this meter. This is like my go-to diagnostic tool. This is like more of my commercial industrial. Then when I'm going to my residential jobs, I bring this guy here, love it. I've got the Fluke 337 clamp on. It's so nice, and I got my leads and all that. So let's talk about this. If you look at your meter, and some people neglect this, so I'm gonna show you guys here, this meter tells you that it's got a 600 volt category three rating. I don't know if you guys can see that properly. Let's see if it's there. 600 volt category three rating. That means that this meter here is good up to being able to handle 600 volts. Very important that voltage rating. Put this down for a second. This meter, and why I use this for industrial is, you can look at this. It is 1000 volts. Let's get that by the focusing on that. 1000 volts category three. We're gonna talk about that. Your meter voltage rating is so very, very important, and it's not even anything that you can laugh at and think, oh, if use is gonna blow, let me tell you a story. I worked up North Fort McMurray. There was a site that was next to the site that I worked at. I worked at a Petri Canada site. It's now become Suncore. There was a trouble, there was a trouble. There was trouble at, I think it was their elevator. And their elevator was running on, I think, 3,160 volts, or some weird voltage like that. They sent over somebody from our site who was an instrument tech slash journeyman electrician. He had the dual ticket, but he was more I before E. You'll hear that a lot if you work with dual ticketed guys. You've got people that are more instrumentation and electrical or more electrical than instrumentation. They always say you're best at your first trade. I would tend to agree with that. If you don't agree with that, you can private message me, whatever. So they sent him over. He wasn't thinking, he grabbed what he thought was his meter and he walked over there. He thought he had his Fluke 87. He didn't check his meter. Cause a lot of you guys, if you work with Fluke, they look very similar. He turned on his meter, went to voltage and then put the meter leads on the bus. Now here's the thing that was wrong with, there's a few things wrong with this, is he didn't check his meter at all. So what he'd used was a signal process meter, which is good up to 30 volts. That's it, 30 volts. Now you would think, okay, well, the meter must have some safety system in there. He had 3000 volts on a meter that could handle 30 volts. Voltage is like electrical pressure. That thing literally, and this is no, I'm not trying to be hyperbolic or exaggerate anything. The thing literally blew up in his hands. He ended up with like third degree burns on his hands and I think he even lost a finger. And that's because he did not check to see what the voltage rating of the meter was. Now even my 87.3 wouldn't have been able to handle that. You'd have to get a proper meter for that, a high voltage meter. You gotta watch your voltage ratings on these things guys. You can't just grab any meter or if your girlfriend or your wife or your boyfriend or your husband gives you a meter for Christmas, that's awesome, but it might be one that you wanna just keep around the house, all right? So that voltage rating, very important, watch for that. Secondly, thanks for the likes. Secondly, you got to watch out for, especially when you're using this, when you're using this 87.3, there's two ways you can go. You can stick, if you're using voltage, you can plug this guy into this guy and away you go because you're reading your load in parallel. If you're just putting your meter, this guy's going parallel to the circuit. Now when we're dealing with an ammeter for those of you who've gone to school, those of you who haven't, you're gonna wanna listen to this, an ammeter needs to be in series with the circuit. Because of that, the ammeter has very low resistance. Now with this one, if you have your common in here and then your ammeter, that puts it in series. So what the problem with that is, this ends up having a very low resistance and the circuit the current is gonna take, I mean with low resistance means higher current, right? It's gonna go right through your meter, it's gonna hopefully just blow your fuse. If you're dealing with high currents, it could blow the meter up. So watch for that, all right? Secondly, you've got to watch for these leads. These leads here, your meter's great, but your leads are what make first contact, right? These are the things that are touching that. I use this one to show exactly what not to do. I added these leads on here. You notice these leads here? Yeah, there's a little burn mark in them. That's because this lead touched the side of a receptacle and then touched the side of a box and then I saw spots for a little bit because there's a big arc flash. Nothing too serious, but again, you've gotta watch that stuff. Now these leads I would not trust because they've been compromised. They've got a burn mark on them and they got a little edge out of it there. So I'm gonna say that these leads need to go. I need to replace these leads. And I have, just so you know, I don't use these leads when I'm out in the field. I just use them to show you guys. So you wanna check the integrity of your leads. You wanna make sure that all the wire's good up to there because these guys here see the voltage as well, right? This guy's reading it, but these guys are touching it. So watch for that. You gotta watch for your leads. Give me a like if you agree with that one. Now let's talk about these categories, one, two and three and four. When we're dealing with these things, you out in the field want no less than a category three meter. Category one meters are generally for signals, all right? So if you're an instrument tech, like that one meter signal processing meter that I was talking about earlier, it was meant to set out like a four to 20 milliamp range, that sort of thing. It was used for setting up instruments. So that could be class as a class one because it's meant for signals. And when these categories, they're to do with how much of a voltage spike a meter can handle. Because if you've got a voltage spike, again, pressure, boom. So you wanna make sure that these things are designed to be able to handle the pressure. So you've got category one. I've called up National Instruments website. I'm just gonna look at it on my iPad and tell you what the categories are. So this is important. So category one is for measurements of voltages for specifically protected secondary circuits, such as signals. So we're talking about the signals. Category two, this category refers to local level electrical distribution such as that provided for by a standard wall outlet or plug in loads. This is the kind that you're gonna have generally at your home. Like the ones that you buy from Home Depot or Canadian Tire from Canada, they're generally gonna be these lower category ones, category two. You're not gonna wanna take that out into the field guys unless you're doing strictly all residential all the time. Hopefully you're not doing residential all the time. You're gonna get called on to higher projects because basically all you're doing is checking into plugs. Well, that plug is protected by a panel upstream which is set to be able to trip on big spikes. So you're protected that way. Category three, this category measures the measurements of hardwired equipment in fixed installations, distribution boards and circuit breakers. So that's why we're using our category three because it can handle voltage spikes. And I'll talk about, there's a chart that I'll put down in the comments later. You're gonna wanna watch for that. Category four, this category refers to the origin of insulation or utility level measurements. So some of you guys are working on high voltage. You probably have category four meters. Now when you get into it, it's all to do with your voltage spikes. So category four, when you're dealing with these voltages can handle up to like my 1000 volt meter. I'm just looking at this chart right now can handle up to a 12,000 volt spike. Sorry, 8,000 volt spike. So if that goes through, boom, your my meter can handle that. If you took a little category one meter, let's see what they don't even list the category once. It can only handle a 4,000 volt spike. It sounds like a lot, but it's not when you're dealing with voltage spikes. So keep that in mind. Alrighty, so I'm gonna put that natural instruments. I'll give you a link to that in my comments below. If you are finding value with these, please, please share. I'm not making any money off these Facebook lives just so you know, I'm not rich, live in large because I'm doing lots of Facebooks. I'm doing this because I like doing it. I wanna get the information out there and I think it's really important. So again, with your meters, watch for your category. If you're working on the tools, make sure you have no less than a category three meter to handle those voltage spikes and please, please check your voltage rating on that. All right, also you wanna check your leads. You wanna make sure your batteries, here's another good tip. Make sure the batteries and your fluke are good because if not, they're gonna give you wicked crazy readings. I was at a house probably about two months ago. They had, I was just checking the voltage on something because I had just wired up a baseboard heat or something. They had 294 volts line to line. I thought that's crazy. There's no way they got 294 volts. I took out my second meter to check on that and there was actually 232 or something like that. So it was all because my battery, that'll happen. So I knew that I always bring two meters with me just to double check. So the battery was dying and it starts giving me a funky reading. So keep your meters. They're the thing that keep you alive. Make sure you're taking good care of them. Don't just toss them around, wrap them up nice, put them away, treat them like a lady, treat them like their best man. You gotta treat them good, all right?