What I would do is; find a capacitor and connect it in parallel with the multimeter leads, at the meter. Pull the leads out of the meter, stuff one pigtail from the capacitor into each socket, then push the lead back in. Best bet somewhere from 100nF to 100uF.
Your mileage may vary.
Better multimeters (Fluke) tend not to suffer this problem.
If that doesn't work, try adding some series resistance in one lead. Assuming it's a digital meter with a 1 Megohm input impedance, anything up to 10K should help the filtering without changing the actual reading by enough to worry about.
Amanda
Similarly a few 5W panels are not going to run the inverter for many minutes a day.
Diodes will worsen the problem by adding a volt drop in addition to that caused by the limited battery capability. The inverter when connected and not running will store some charge in its input capacitors but the effect will not happen when running.
Try Amanda's tricks to make sure the meter is reading correctly but expect very low volts from those batteries driving a big inverter.
Flux[ Parent ]
