The Fluke 805 is not a vibration pen; it’s a meter. Even better, it’s a Fluke meter. A Fluke meter that eliminates the confusion of vibration screening and provides reliable measurements customers can trust to make critical go or no-go maintenance decisions.

Most vibration pens and other screening devices currently on the market provide an overall number for vibration condition and some also provide an overall number for bearing condition. Due to pain points caused by inadequate design and measurement technology, customers consider the products to be unreliable, difficult to understand and are generally viewed as a hassle. Some experts and customers even refer to them as toys. Until the new Fluke 805 Vibration Meter.

The Fluke 805 is far superior to its competitors on very front including feature set, form factor and brand promise. It provides quantifiable results of bearing condition, overall vibration and temperature, assesses condition severity using text-based alerts, and exports and trends data using built-in templates. Our customers told us what was wrong with the other vibration screening pens and devices. We listened, and the Fluke 805 Vibration Meter is our answer. We made a more accurate, more user friendly tool to improve day-to-day machine checks, so customers can keep their facilities and plants up and running. See below for direct quotes from our customers about their pain points with competing products, and the Fluke 805 solutions to those problems.

What is Crest Factor +?

What is Crest Factor +? Fluke 805 with Crest Factor + takes the confusion out of bearing assessment
The original Crest Factor is used by vibration analysts to identify bearing faults. It is defined as the ratio of the peak value/RMS value of a time domain vibration signal.

A key limitation of using Crest Factor to iden- tify bearing faults is that the Crest Factor does not increase linearly as the bearing degrades. In fact, the Crest Factor can actually decrease as a bearing nears catastrophic failure due to large RMS values.

In order to overcome this limitation, Fluke uses a proprietary algorithm known as Crest Factor + (CF+). CF+ values range from 1 to 16. As the bearing condition worsens, the CF+ value increases. To keep things simple, Fluke has also included a four-level severity scale that identifies the bearing health as Good, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory or Unacceptable.

Exporting and Trending with the 805

Export and Trend in Excel
Trending, or repeated vibration measurements kept in a spreadsheet over time, is the best method to track machine health. With 805 you can easily:

• Export your result to Excel through USB connection
• Trend the readings with the pre-built Excel templates and plot graphs
• Compare the overall vibration readings to ISO Standards (10816-1, 10816-3, 10816-7)

Import measurements from the 805 Vibration Meter to an Excel template on your PC in order to trend the bearing parameters: overall vibration, CF+, and temperature. Looking at just the number alone for the overall vibration or temperature might not be of much benefit to the operator or technician if they don’t know what the number means. The user may not know what is normal or what indicates a problem.

If measurements taken on the operator rounds are easily loaded into Excel, then the trend will show patterns of something that is becoming abnormal. The user can now see a clear picture of the changing bearing condition and deteriorating health of the machine.