Kids & Electric flyswatters the deadly enemy of any multimeter

[Kiriakos GR]

Just read a topic in a Greek forum: A kid hobbyist  liked to measure the volts of his Electric flyswatter and what he managed to do is to burn his low cost multimeter.

The truth about those High Volts tennis rackets is that they do have an output starting from 1000V, the latest models are up to 2500V and the finest in 2010 they advertised as 3500V.

When I got recently my FLUKE 40KV stick  (volts divider) so to measure high volts by the use of a multimeter,
I did use my own Electric flyswatter as a harmless test point.

Even so I did measured 2950 Volts as output.   

What people should be aware is the fact that even in profesional multimeter with 1000V CAT IV,  the safety which they offer against High Volt  spikes ( 3500V - 8000V ) , it does not actually translate that the meter it will recover after been exposed in a such event.

What gained as additional info by visiting the Wiki page,  is the info that the inventor is a man in Taiwan. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-killing_device#Electric_flyswatter

[giorgos]

I think that the high voltage of this stuff, is a very short pulse (some miliseconds). Does your meter, or any reliable meter is capable to capture a short pulse like this, and measure  with precision the voltage ?

[Kiriakos GR]

In the specific item there is one set of capacitors which they store energy.

The finest DMM are capable to measure up to 1000V,  anything above that mark is unfriendly energy which the meter should protect the user by safely absorbing the energy.

You are correct that this is a pulse, but the problem is the duration.
In CAT testing the duration of its one HV pulse is set to standard values which represent an instant spike.

In this case the stored energy in those capacitors I believe that is much higher from what the industry is using in their testing labs.