Testing an electric water temperature guage

Hello everyone,

I have a Sun blue line 260° electric water temperature guage,how can I test it at home,there are two poles on the back, one for ignition, the other for the sending unit, how do I put power to it on the bench, my thought was simply boil water and immerse the sending unit and check the temp.

Thanks for listening!
Joey

I would think with a 12V 110V house converter & you fed 12V to the gauge & the gauge negative terminal to the sender terminal and the sender body (threads) back to the neg wire on the converter that that would do it. EDIT I'd maybe wanna stick a thermometer into the water to check accuracy at different temps (up to boiling) to compare to the gauge readings but thats assuming the thermometer being used is accurate & the hardware store air temp one I have is WAY off (& a different one was too) so that is a FYI caveat.

I did use a temp probe from a tool vender to test it when the car was running and it showed a 30 degree difference, maybe I should have tried another temp probe to verify the results. Thanks for the input!

Best on a stove where you can bring the water in a pot up & then let it cool.
Meat thermometer is what I use to verify thermostats.
Bring a 12V source into the house with some jumpers; know how/where the gauge grounds & of course keep the power & ground away from the water.

What I do is stick the probe in boiling water and see what temp it picks up. And also use a temperature gun in a few spots on the engine when it's running to see how that compares to the gauge. Neither are dead on but at least give you the general idea if it's working or not.

If the probe needs ground you'll need to clip a ground on to the threads if you remove it from the engine.

If it were me, I'd just use a car battery & boiling water. Water always boils at 212F (at sea level & slightly lower in the mountains)