Joe, interesting tests, but when you mentioned "Mother Nature" I thought you would also go the other side of 0°C. I was thinking the chances of survivability of a DMM on a cold weather are much higher than on sunny hot weather. The obvious first casualty would be the LCD, thus it would have to be protected from direct sunlight. I imagine the second casualty would be the plastic enclosure, which depending on the material it will be affected by the UV.
Summer is coming and maybe I get one of these and try to do a test here. With the temperatures we can reach here in Texas (sometimes we get +40°C in the shade), I suspect the little Brymen/Amprobe would not fare as well. I could also leave it in the attic, where temps easily reach +45°C (maybe more).
Oh well... thanks again for the video and keep on burning them!
It doesn't get very warm here during the Fall to Spring months. Having it sit in the car during the mid Winter months, the meter goes from a very cold temp to toasty and back to cold in a short time.
Yes, the wide variance in temperature would have a very extreme effect as well. However, I have no idea what would be the survivability rate of a meter inside a car during summer - in the worst days it can reach 55°C.
My cars and bikes use LCDs in their instrument clusters. The bikes have a back cluster. The cars will sit in the sun with their windows up. I have not seen an LCD fail in these conditions.
Yes, I haven't either in my car and its LCD clusters, but none of them are in direct sunlight exposure. Leaving my ancient Fluke 27 or any other more modern meter facing the sun starts with a rainbow effect and culminating with a complete blackout.
I don't recall any permanent damage to the meters, but maybe a test like that would be one more datapoint between the various budget brands. If I am feeling brave, I may try that as well, but I don't have the same range of meters than you (I tend to resell the meters I evaluate, so I can keep on going with this hobby).
It would be interesting to have someone else try and replicate True's findings. The claim was five of these all failing the same? I would have expected that after everything I have exposed this one to that it would have been damaged. True and his friend must have some magic combination.
I kinda lost interest after he/she stopped responding. To our benefit, you kept pushing and came with a very interesting series of tests after that.