OK, let's hear some pros and cons. I am in the market and want to hear from personal experience.

The one that I built myself, because it only cost a few bucks in parts. And I like doing things myself.

Charlie

Electronic Design Specialists 88A. Range is .47 to 2200uf. Has auto discharge, or fast test if you don't need the discharge feature. It has a slider control that is used to eliminate the effects of in-circuit resistance, so you can test caps in resistive or inductive circuits without removing them. I've used one for years and haven't had to replace the batteries yet.

I'd like to warn you away from the MAT Electronics MUL4333. It's okay for cap pass/fail, but it's not accurate as a general-purpose low-ohms meter, and the circuit board looks like it was put together by an 8-year-old at the kitchen table, using dad's lighter to solder.

Dave Wise

I have the little Dick Smith kit I built about 10 yrs ago, it was only about $50 and works good. Looks like they are still available http://www.flippers.com/esrktmtr.html

I also prefer the Dick Smith meter.I also built mine about
10yrs ago.Has the Anatek input protection mod so if you
accidentally go across a fully charged cap up to 450 volts
there won't be any sparks or other problems.I like it because
it is fast to use.At my job we have boards made by Sony that
are packed with electrolytics and with the Dick Smith you can
crank through all those caps in circuit in no time.If I really need
to get the goods on a cap I will use our Stanford Research
SR720 LCR analyzer.
Regards,
Swanson

Here's a link to more than you ever wanted to know, including many roll your own.
http://kripton2035.free.fr/esr-repository.html

I made an analog one that works very nicely for the solid state work I do. The one
I built was here:
http://members.shaw.ca/swstuff/esrmeter.html

Dick Smith is Australian, as I recall. We'd occasionally see their kit in England, but I'm surprised to find such popularity in the USA.

Creative Electronics, because it is analog. We had them in the shop decades ago, and I have used one ever since. They turn up on eBay from time to time.

Peak Atlas ESR70. Plusses: Auto discharges up to 50V, high charge protection, auto polarity, reads fast, measures consistent, reads both ESR and capacitance (latter out of circuit), small size, excellent display, ESR/Low ohms down to .01 ohm (and up to 40 ohms if the cap REALLY has an issue!), audio signals that are actually helpful, great company support in that they upgraded older ESR 60's for a low price. Minuses: Test leads could be better and include actual pointed probes, lead cable is too stiff and unit is so light it tends to fly around, auto shut-off shuts off too quickly IMHO, unit is a bit pricey but I feel the included protection is worth the cost. This company designs a variety of specialty component testers, and in looking at the boards used and the features its obvious Peak knows what they are doing compared to the many others who are just cobbling together one-off ESR testers to sell.

The "ESR Blue" available as a kit is actually the current "Dick Smith" design model.

-Mark-

Unless you are into SS or computer work a ESR meter is a total waste of money as they apply no voltage to actually evaluate leakage. With the small number of electrolytics in tube equipment and the probability of high leakage approaching 100% just replace them and be done with it.

Anatek is local to me and I drove over and purchased a Blue model a few years ago and quickly dumped it as useless for my needs. Even with a highly complex SS receiver such as the HRO-500, experience has told me that all 25 electrolytics are garbage anyway.

If you dont mind wasting time and money then get a Sprague Model 16, TC-3 thru TC-6A, military ZM-11, or another quality model with a real meter, overhaul it and calibrate. Then find out what most everyone already knows...old paper and electrolytics are bad....period.

The tube based testers are good at finding mica cap problems but so is a scope and VTVM with a real meter....and you can buy both for the cost of most cap testers. Stay far away from the so called "service grade" with an eye tube and as cheap as possible circuitry.

Carl

It depends on what you want to do. Another forum member gave me a broken Anatek "blue" meter a couple of years ago, and after fixing it, I've used it for solid state work with a high degree of success. It serves as a good "high resistance electrolytic capacitor" detector. When modern electrolytics fail, they often behave as if there is a big resistor in series with them--at least at the frequencies switching supplies operate at. With many circuit boards, it is impractical to unsolder and replace dozens of good capacitors in the hopes of catching the one which failed.

But the fact of the matter is, I would not have spent the $99 or whatever a "blue" meter costs myself. Any oscilloscope with a calibrator output can serve the same purpose. You simply connect the "Cal" output to the probe tip through a 1-k Ohm resistor with a clip lead, and adjust for a nice square wave display that fills about 2/3 of the screen top-to-bottom. Then connect the probe tip (with the cal signal still connected) and ground clip to the electrolytic you want to test. If the cap is good, it will drag the square wave down to the baseline. A bad cap will leave you with some or all of the square wave still standing. It takes a little practice to get the hang of it, and you might want to vary the size of the resistor to suit bigger or smaller caps, but it is possible to get through dozens of capacitors on a board in a few minutes and find the dud without fail. Since the "Cal" outputs on most scopes are 0.5-volts or less, you can do the testing in-circuit with little chance of forward-biasing semiconductors.

Fox fixing antique radios and related items, ESR readings are generally pointless. Old capacitors are much more likely to be suffering from excessive leakage--which is a DC phenomena--than high ESR, which shows up on AC. So a HV leakage tester is more useful here. Most of the "eye tube" resistor-capacitor bridges on the market also test for leakage at high voltages. Those bridges also usually have the ability to measure AC power factor, which is a close cousin to ESR.

Now if you need an actual ESR reading for some reason, most any of the current meters on the market will do fine. As will many of the older lab grade LCR bridges that are available. (With a lab bridge, you'd be measuring dissipation and quality factor, which can be converted to ESR mathematically).

I mainly agree with Carl.

I don't have an ESR meter and never considered getting one. Suspect capacitors can be replaced cheaply. I occasionally repair switch-mode power supplies, but can generally tell by scope waveforms or bulged electrolytics.

When I worked at Siliconix in the late 80s, we designed switch-mode power supply chips and built prototypes of complete power supplies. We did not have an ESR meter, though we had hundreds of thousands of dollars in other test equipment.

I do have a DMM with capacitance ranges. Helpful when sorting surplus capacitors without obvious markings. Not very good for testing caps at real operating conditions.

Rich

Carl said


Chris said


+1

Never have owned an ESR meter, with all the other TE, I couldn't ever see the need.

The scope and cal output is an ingenious solution, but does require grounding one side of every cap you test. The standalone ESR meters are isolated.

If you test a lot of solid-state gear, an ESR meter is a time-saver. For tube equipment it's useless. I had a Dick Smith, before it grew legs and got away, and one of these days I should replace it.

For whatever reasons or construed uselessness it has my ESR tester is the one electronics tool borrowed from me the most. No, it wouldn't be the first piece of test equipment I would run out and buy, and if all I worked on was tube gear I probably wouldn't buy one at all. But it fills a niche for solid state equipment capacitor testing well. Its not a know-all-tell-all, but nothing is.

-Mark-

Thanks for the replies so far!!
Let me clarify a bit... I don't want one for old vintage tube type electrolytic testing, I still use the trash-can sound method for that. I am mainly interested in the ultra modern switch mode power supply troubleshooting. Since this will be a learn as I go, I thought a decent ESR meter would be an asset to all My other gear. I'm leaning towards the blue one from Anatek as nobody says they're junk or bad and they are at what seems to be a good price.

I wouldn't be without one for servicing solid state equipment, particularly the newer stuff with dozens of little electrolytics on a PC board. Saves lots of time by being able to check the caps in circuit for being open or having high ESR. In the rare case of a shorted electrolytic, or a very low shunt resistance in the circuit, it won't help you at all.

There's another version of this idea that you can setup if you have a Wavetek or other low z out signal generator. You put a BNC tee on the scope and connect a direct probe to one end and the generator to the other. Since the Wavetek is 50 ohms out, you can get a pretty good guess as to the ESR of a cap by how far it pulls the trace down. Some TV service guys use this trick.

RRM

Plus 1. I picked up a Capacitor Wizard for the home shop after using one at work for several
years. It has paid for itself several times over when trouble shooting monitor boards or switching
supplies--especially those that didn't have documentation. Finding a bad cap in a board filled
with 20 or 30 caps in a few minutes is one reason I invested in a good ESR meter.
Unfortunately a Cap Wizards with the protection module runs over 200 bucks these days
and I sure most guys on here won't spring for one

For vintage radios or vintage tvs they are a complete waste of
time and money, but for densely packed boards, especially those laden with SMD
electrolytics, they are worth their weight in gold.

Pete