You can get sparks easly on static discharges on you're car, on a shopping cart or even with two tiny 3,45VA back to back transformers that can be found on older cordless phones or cell phones ( e.g. nokia 5110 chargers) and i found that 6VA can do a good job in taking out a triac silently by the worst way without tripping the multimeter and this is low power 230V isolated, so imagine novices using HV power sources and their meters ...
About the meters the Brymen, Fluke , Amprobe for example they make for electricians , so they have the experience and hard time on how to build a multimeter. Try the 121GW and the Brymen BM235 EEVdition
One thing it would be good is to show some transients that can appear on the 230Vac line to demonstrate what multimeters are dealing in the field .
Imagine having a document of how every novice has damaged a meter.
I will be the first to admit, I damaged my poor analog Radio Shack meter several times doing all sorts of stupid things to it.
At some point, I do plan to run a mature version of the 121GW. I doubt that is going to happen this year like I had hoped. Based on my initial tests on the prototype, I am not holding out much hope but then again, Dave mentioned they are making a change to the one clamp which I know is a weak section of the meter.
I've seen pretty good results with Brymen, Fluke, HIOKI and the Gossen from a robustness stand point. The AMPROBE AM530 did not do very well and the AM510 I consider the minimum. I think both are UNI-T products. I wonder about the AMPROBE pocket meter that True mentions having four dead ones. Again, we have no way of knowing how their meters were treated but I am curious how it holds up compared the others I've looked at.
Again, I doubt I will ever show actual AC line tests. There is the cost to set up to run a test like this. The generator, filters, blast shield... If you go that far, you may as well have it all certified. I suspect it would be more cost effective to rent a lab for a few days and just run several. Cheapest and safest thing is just read about it and watch some videos. Maybe you would want to take this on?