How many times have you poked around a circuit with a digital multimeter (DMM), read an AC voltage value, then gone on your merry way? Ever wonder if your meter is giving you peak value, average value ...

On infrequent occasions, I am asked to design a circuit to measure the RMS value of a current or voltage for some kind of power measurement. Since the work I do is hardly unique, I thought some of you ...

I really wanted to title this piece ‘Of RMS and the Mean I sing’. But wise editorial heads have told me more than once that quirky titles don’t draw people in, and that such mock erudition will ...

Test meters used to just provide the basics: voltage, current, and resistance. Thanks to solid-state circuitry, though, today's instruments are packed with several features the typical electrician may ...

If you mostly deal with DC current, you might not think much of root mean square or RMS measurements. Sure, you’ve seen meters that have “true RMS” settings, but what does it mean? If you don’t know — ...

A “loose neutral” in a residential location can cause equipment damage and even a house fire. An open neutral may start as a high-resistance connection that shows subtle signs in waveform capture data ...

Low power factor reduces an electrical system’s distribution capacity by increasing current flow. Therefore, having a low power factor is inefficient and expensive. But what is power factor and what ...