How to test a microwave capacitor

Testing your microwave capacitor. Before testing, please ensure that the capacitor has been discharged. For safely discharging your capacitor, please watch our video on discharging your microwave capacitor. Here's our microwave capacitor, and we can see it's clearly labeled on the side, 0.95 µF, standing for microfarad. And next to that plus or minus 3%. This means that its reading should fall within 3% of the 0.95. To test your microwave capacitor, set your multimeter to capacitance. This will look like two parentheses facing away from each other. Next, take your meter leads and place each lead on one set of the capacitor's terminals. Here we can see the meter reading 944.7 nF standing for a nano farad, which would be the equivalent of 0.95 microfarads. If the capacitor is out of range by the allowed amount given on the label or the meter reads OL at any time, the capacitor has failed and needs to be replaced.