What device is used to check capacitors in electronic circuits?
As a common failure of capacitors is high leakage current or short circuit, an ordinary ohm meter might check for that at DC. It can also be used for a rough estimate of the charge time, or capacitance in some cases (especially larger values). A capacitance meter (for want of a better name) measures the capacitance. Some multimeters have this function, but it is more likely you need an LCR meter, which measures inductance, capacitance and resistance at a low frequency, so that resonance due to parasitic values is not an issue. These range from low cost hand held (maybe 3% accurate) to lab instruments with 6 digit precision. There are numerous methods used to measure capacitance. Another method is substitution, just replace the suspect capacitor with a good one, but it doesn’t make sense to replace everything without some idea about the cause of the problem. There are also network analysers, which measure the capacitor’s and other component’s behaviour over a range of frequencies. They
