Fluke has some good info on their website.
Thank you for the links. I read them, but I don't trust them. We too have a marketing department that weekly writes scary articles to pursue people to use our services. And, despite Fluke wildly insists, I don't care if my DMM to survives a 10kV transient.
I want to survive it, but I don't really care about equipment. But two things I learned from that docs: 1) do not use crappy probes 2) be careful with inductive loads. Still not clear how I can get damaged in other cases. I can only think of a case that the arc gets through the DMM's body.
That's the thing - they often do explode. Watch the videos in this thread
No, that's the author makes them exploding. How many meters actually exploded just by connecting to mains? That's my question: how dangerous they are when you don't try to "measure" 3kV pulses on purpose and use proper probes. It doesn't mean I'm proposing to abandon you flukes, guys, and replace them with Mastech or Uni-T. I'm not saying this. Please keep burning multimeters. I just want to understand how real the threat is.
Some scientific date would be nice. Like, 10% of Mastech customers die annually because of electric shock. Or, Fluke users live 10 years longer and have less changes of divorce. Or at least some statistics how many transient a typical household has (I found no such date).
There can be dangerous power surges in the mains due to nearby lightning strikes or faults in the distribution system that allow high voltages to jump over onto the low voltage side. The usual impact of this is to damage equipment in your house like televisions or computers, or in the worst case to set your house on fire.
I was waiting for this comment
. To my mind, home equipment is much less protected from power surges than an "average" multimeter. So I think for an average hobbyist there is more danger to get killed/injured by a dishwashing machine, or a microwave, or a faulty phone charger. Or by my DIY power supply, which only has a conventional toroidal transformer to protect me from mains (and maximum isolation voltage not even specified).