weight scales

[michael mitchell]

wanting to know any good digital weight scales(inexpensive) for weighing equipment.NOTE: not someones bathroom scale and not the old meat scale!:) thanks!

[jennifer ross]

Jk. I use a little food scale I got at walmart for $20. Does grams, oz, and lbs. I like it, it's accurate enough.

[Sam Farrington]

Staples has low priced scales that measure in eighths and tenths of an ounce.
You can also find scales with hanging hooks that are great for weighing packs – they usually run 0-25 or 0-50 lbs.
If you need to measure in smaller increments, please post, and I will dig out a link for my small battery scale that measures in thousandths of an ounce. That would be more expensive, running in the $25-50 range.

[Jerry Adams]

As suggested by Dan Durston, I bought one of these, has worked good, took a few weeks shipping – http://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-Pocket-Balance-Weight-jewelry-Scale-0-1g-2000g-/190490305861?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c5a1b6545

[Rusty Beaver]

I'm looking too and ran across these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/7Kg-x-1g-Digital-Kitchen-Scale-Diet-Food-Compact-Kitchen-Scale-15lb-x-0-04oz-/320763292334?pt=Small_Kitchen_Appliances_US&hash=item4aaefb6aae

Can anyone weigh in?

[Ken K]

I picked up a $15 food scale from Walmart. Up to 5kg in 1 gram increments (also does ounces to the tenth and pounds to the hundredth). Instant gratification. Didn't need to wait 4 weeks for an ebayer to ship it from Hong Kong. A year later, it's still using the original battery.

[Christopher Pyle]

That looks like a nice scale for a good deal!

[Jay Wilkerson]

Any Staples, Office Depot or Office Max will have cheap scales.

2 cents

[Scott Pickard]

Bought the next version up at Walmart also. Goes to 10lbs. and cost $20.00 Can't believe knit cap weighs as much as my Gerber Paraframe. LOL

[Michael Ray]

I also have the Walmart kitchen scale though it seems its real limit is around 8 lbs. Other than that it seems quite accurate and repeatable. Still on original batt after 2+ years.

[Randy Nelson]

I've been happy with this one from Harbor Freight. $18 on sale right now. But everything is on sale a HF fairly often.

http://www.harborfreight.com/digital-scale-95364.html

[Mary D]

I really like my digital postage scale from Office Depot: Pelouze Model SP5. I bought it 6 years ago for $25. It may now, of course, be more expensive and maybe not the same model. It weighs up to 5 lbs. to the nearest 0.1 oz. or 1.0 g. (I hope that none of you has a single piece of gear that weighs more than 5 pounds!) It has a tare function so you can contain bulky items and weigh them without having to perform subtraction. I just changed the battery for the first time since I bought it. It's small enough that I can take it in my purse (just barely) when I'm shopping (much to the horror of the clerks in REI).

The scale is, of course, a multi-function item, which can also be used to weigh food for dieting, for backpacking meals, for cooking from European recipes. It can even be used for postage. In the last function, it gets checked against the Post Office's scales yearly when I mail my tax returns.

[Warren Greer]

Get the Dan Durston scale mentioned above. It costs around $7.25 delivered and is an excellent purchase. I have another scale that costs as much as some of those mentioned above but does not weight in as small of increments that the cheaper DandyDan scale does. Heck, I should sell my more expensive one as I never use it anymore anyway. Take Jerry's advice, that (DandyDan) scale will meet all you needs and save you a ton of dough you can put toward your next gear purchase.

edit: Get a scale that can do down to at least .1 grams. Beleive me, you'll want it. .1 ounces is not a high enough resolution. The scale recommended above will do all you need.

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

I went on craigslist and picked up a baby scale for about $20. It will weigh up to 40 lbs. I used it to track my cats weight (~8 lbs). Works well for larger pieces of equipment. I use an Ohous scale for the small stuff (<2000 gm). Best regards -Jon

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

Last night I accidentally spilled fuel all over my eBay 'digital pocket scale' when I was weighing stoves and forgot one was still full of fuel. The fuel rain inside the scale onto the circuit board and it shut off. I thought it was fried, but an hour later I popped the batteries back in and it works just fine.

I really love these little scales. There's no need to spend $20 or more for a scale when these will do everything for maybe $7 shipped. They go to 2000g (4.4 lbs), measure to 0.1g and they're totally accurate. Weighing bulky stuff isn't hard either if you get a little creative. My common trick is to set something like a glass on the scale, zero the scale and then set the bulky item on the glass.

These scales come in a variety of max weights, (ie. up to 500g, 1000g, 2000g etc) with 2000g being the highest you can get. So do an eBay search for 'digital pocket scale 2000g' and then sort the results by price+shipping.

[Mary D]

1 gram, per my converter, is 0.035 oz., which should be plenty small enough–my scale weighs in both metric and US units. If I want something finer than 0.1 oz., I weigh in grams and convert. I can't see how getting down to less than a gram would be helpful.

My bathroom scale, a Taylor digital model, weighs to the nearest 0.1 pound, which is finer than what I want to weigh myself –to the nearest pound is bad enough :-), but works well for weighing my pack after loading. It's interesting to see how close the total pack weight on my spreadsheet comes to the real total pack weight. One time I took everything out and repacked because the pack was a whole pound lighter than the spreadsheet, and I was sure that I must have missed something! After all that, I discovered that it was the food (for which my spreadsheet has the weight of an average meal) that was less than the average. It turned out that I still took too much food!

[Jerry Adams]

Another way to weigh bulky items is to use a hanger

0.1 gram or 0.01 ounce is good for weighing down, otherwise 1 gram or 0.1 ounce are probably good enough

One thing I hate about kitchen scales, is they weigh to the nearest 1/8 ounce – decimal is easier to deal with, like the "Dandy Dan" scale.

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

Going smaller than 0.1oz is important to me when I'm MYOG'ing stuff. When I'm tossing a cordlock on something, you'll have ones that weigh 2.5g and one's that weigh 1.5g that often aren't very different in size. It's nice to know precisely what these things weigh so you can evaluate your options. I don't always choose the smallest, but rather the lightest one that's roughly the size I want. With a complex MYOG item like a shelter you can often save a decent amount of weight by making a bunch of small decisions right.

0.1g resolution is also nice when you're doing things like stove fuel efficiency testing. 0.1oz is a significant amount of fuel. If you have two stoves and one uses .45oz per pint boiled, while the other uses 0.54oz, then you'd have no idea one stove uses 20% more fuel if your scale just read 0.5oz for both.

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