Stumbled onto a cheap capacitor tester that saved me hours

I was chasing a dead PSU on an older Dell Optiplex last week and kept getting inconsistent voltage readings with my multimeter. After wasting like 2 hours swapping parts, I grabbed a $12 component tester off Amazon on a whim. Turns out three caps on the board were totally dead but not bulging - this thing caught them in 30 seconds. Has anyone else used one of those cheap transistor testers for quick cap checks?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_anthony20d ago

Grabbed one of those little things last year after my multimeter started lying to me about everything. @adam_patel is right they're way too useful for what they cost. I found a dead cap on a router board that was causing random dropouts, cap looked brand new but the tester said ESR was like 50 ohms or something stupid. Now I keep the damn thing in my main toolbox right next to my soldering iron instead of buried in a drawer somewhere.

adam_patel21d ago

Grabbed one of those cheap testers a few months back after my buddy Brian spent an entire weekend trying to fix a dead monitor. He'd checked every solder joint twice and was about to toss the thing. I loaned him my tester and he found two leaking caps in like five minutes, caps that looked completely fine to the naked eye. Saved him from buying a whole new monitor, which was nice. Those little testers are honestly way more useful than they have any right to be for the price.