Do you have a bathroom scale that you recommend?
April 12, 2025 6:44 AM Subscribe
My bathroom scale has gone wonky. I can step on it a few times in a row and it will give me a slightly different weight each time.
I seek one that is budget-priced but still reliably consistent and accurate, and that has no bells and whistles ... no BMI calculations, etc.
I seek one that is budget-priced but still reliably consistent and accurate, and that has no bells and whistles ... no BMI calculations, etc.
We had a simple Weight Watchers scale that lasted for decades. It recently died so we ordered another one just like it--very simple with no bells and whistles. It works fine.
posted by serendipityrules at 7:32 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
posted by serendipityrules at 7:32 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
This is not wonky, this is by design. Most new digital scales try to "remember" what the last recorded weight was, so that they don't have to spend more time calculating what the new weight is, or something like that. One of the women's magazines recently recommended doing this: take something really heavy, like a lifting weight, and stand on the scale with it, so that the recording weight is wildly different from what you are. Then step off, allow itself to clear, then stand back on again without the weight and you should get an accurate reading.
Make sure that one of the feet isn't in a tile grout groove, all of them touch the floor, you didn't just eat or drink something, etc. etc.
Sorry I can't recommend one, all of the new ones have this feature that I know of.
posted by Melismata at 9:03 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Make sure that one of the feet isn't in a tile grout groove, all of them touch the floor, you didn't just eat or drink something, etc. etc.
Sorry I can't recommend one, all of the new ones have this feature that I know of.
posted by Melismata at 9:03 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Yours is probably good enough for what you're trying to use it for. Body weight varies throughout the day anyway so your measurement, even if absolutely accurate, is still only one data point in a spread. I guess what I'm saying is, if you round it to the nearest 5 (pounds/kilos, whatever you're using), do all the measurements pretty much agree? And then, if weight loss is the goal, can you make the average measurement trend downward. I think measuring body weight to the gram or even pound is false precision anyway, even if accurate at the time of measurement.
I just bought a 12-dollar scale off of Amazon, and it works fine. But it reads in 0.1 pounds, and I never get the exact same reading twice. Such is the nature of measuring things.
posted by ctmf at 9:24 AM on April 12 [5 favorites]
I just bought a 12-dollar scale off of Amazon, and it works fine. But it reads in 0.1 pounds, and I never get the exact same reading twice. Such is the nature of measuring things.
posted by ctmf at 9:24 AM on April 12 [5 favorites]
I have this one and it works great. It does have a bluetooth app with bells and whistles but you don't need to use it (I don't).
It's digital so needs to be charged but the battery lasts months on a charge.
posted by dobbs at 10:11 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
It's digital so needs to be charged but the battery lasts months on a charge.
posted by dobbs at 10:11 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
> I can step on it a few times in a row and it will give me a slightly different weight each time.
If slight is a matter of ounces, it’s good enough for your purposes. Just track the average over the course of your week. If it’s, like, 5-10 pounds off, yes, I’d buy a new one.
posted by moosetracks at 10:22 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
If slight is a matter of ounces, it’s good enough for your purposes. Just track the average over the course of your week. If it’s, like, 5-10 pounds off, yes, I’d buy a new one.
posted by moosetracks at 10:22 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
I've had the Tanita HD-351 scale for 13 years, and it's worked great. It measures your weight with a resolution of 0.2 lbs. If you weigh yourself twice in a row, the results sometimes differ by 0.2 pounds, but never more than that. I'm satisfied with that level of accuracy.
posted by alex1965 at 11:10 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
posted by alex1965 at 11:10 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Most new digital scales try to "remember" what the last recorded weight was, so that they don't have to spend more time calculating what the new weight is, or something like that.
This is my experience with my digital scale. I step on first and let it take its "false reading," then step on again once it's cleared. That second reading is always consistent across subsequent test weighings. I've been using the Calpal for the last six years, and I quite like it.
posted by mykescipark at 1:14 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
This is my experience with my digital scale. I step on first and let it take its "false reading," then step on again once it's cleared. That second reading is always consistent across subsequent test weighings. I've been using the Calpal for the last six years, and I quite like it.
posted by mykescipark at 1:14 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
I use a Wyze scale I bought a few years ago. It's worked fine. It even syncs to my Wyze app which syncs to my Google Health so I can track trends. It supposedly tracks my body fat and stuff too, but it requires certain conductivity on my bare feet which it doesn't always achieve.
posted by kschang at 2:24 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
posted by kschang at 2:24 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Eh, just get a decent quality, old-style, analog, mechanical bathroom scale. Perhaps not perfectly accurate, although calibrating somehow would help, but definitely consistent, simple, cheap, and no muss-no-fuss.
posted by ClingClang at 5:07 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
posted by ClingClang at 5:07 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Mine went wonky yesterday and it was a combination of almost dead battery + losing a foot. I found the foot, glued it back on, and changed the battery and now it's good as new.
posted by A Blue Moon at 4:25 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
posted by A Blue Moon at 4:25 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
I can step on it a few times in a row and it will give me a slightly different weight each time.
How slightly?
I still have the first digital bathroom scale I ever bought. It was the cheapest unbranded no-extra-features tempered glass commodity scale I could find on eBay and it's been completely reliable for over ten years now; all it's needed has been two new batteries. But early on, I thought it was faulty because I kept seeing readings that were mysteriously two and a half kilograms higher than I was expecting, but only sometimes.
As with so much irritating digital screwiness, it turns out that this behaviour is by design and because the guts of all these machines will almost certainly have the same commodity jellybean microcontrollers, I would fully expect any digital scale to exhibit it.
The scale's display blinks once the scale has done enough sampling to establish a stable reading, after which I can step off it and the blinking stops. After giving me about fifteen seconds to look at the number, the display then goes blank to show that the scale has gone back into sleep mode.
We store the scale up on edge next to a set of drawers so that it doesn't get in the way on the floor when not in use. The first step in using it, then, is to pick it up and lay it flat on the floor. If I then just stand on it, it wakes up and takes a measurement that there's a good chance will be too high.
If instead of standing on it straight away I just put one foot on it, lean on it a bit until the display wakes up and then take my foot off, then the display will either show 0.0kg immediately or run through the sequence 2.5kg, C, 0.0kg. Having seen it show 0.0kg in either case, I can then stand on it properly and I'll get an accurate weight reading every time.
What I think is happening is that when it first wakes up, the scale's little digital brain interprets any reading from its sensors that come out to less than about 5kg as the weight of the scale itself. That's the initial 2.5kg. The C is the microcontroller recognizing that reading as less than the weight of any plausible human and remembering it as self-weight to be subtracted from any subsequent sensor input.
If I pick the machine up off the floor and park it on its edge before the display has gone blank - thereby taking all the weight off its load cells before the microcontroller has gone back to sleep - then the display I'm obviously no longer typically paying attention to will read - Err, and the next time it wakes up it has forgotten its own weight and will overread by 2.5kg unless I trigger the 2.5kg, C, 0.0kg calibration sequence first. Which I now do every time I use it, because I can't guarantee that whoever put it away last has given it enough time to shut down on its own first.
If it was always kept flat on the floor instead of being put away standing up, I wouldn't need to do this so regularly and would probably have remained mystified by this issue for years.
I still like it better than my older analog scale, both because it's more precise and because I'm heavy enough to make the dial on that old scale wrap around past maximum, but holy fuck computerized equipment has some irritating failure modes.
posted by flabdablet at 11:50 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
How slightly?
I still have the first digital bathroom scale I ever bought. It was the cheapest unbranded no-extra-features tempered glass commodity scale I could find on eBay and it's been completely reliable for over ten years now; all it's needed has been two new batteries. But early on, I thought it was faulty because I kept seeing readings that were mysteriously two and a half kilograms higher than I was expecting, but only sometimes.
As with so much irritating digital screwiness, it turns out that this behaviour is by design and because the guts of all these machines will almost certainly have the same commodity jellybean microcontrollers, I would fully expect any digital scale to exhibit it.
The scale's display blinks once the scale has done enough sampling to establish a stable reading, after which I can step off it and the blinking stops. After giving me about fifteen seconds to look at the number, the display then goes blank to show that the scale has gone back into sleep mode.
We store the scale up on edge next to a set of drawers so that it doesn't get in the way on the floor when not in use. The first step in using it, then, is to pick it up and lay it flat on the floor. If I then just stand on it, it wakes up and takes a measurement that there's a good chance will be too high.
If instead of standing on it straight away I just put one foot on it, lean on it a bit until the display wakes up and then take my foot off, then the display will either show 0.0kg immediately or run through the sequence 2.5kg, C, 0.0kg. Having seen it show 0.0kg in either case, I can then stand on it properly and I'll get an accurate weight reading every time.
What I think is happening is that when it first wakes up, the scale's little digital brain interprets any reading from its sensors that come out to less than about 5kg as the weight of the scale itself. That's the initial 2.5kg. The C is the microcontroller recognizing that reading as less than the weight of any plausible human and remembering it as self-weight to be subtracted from any subsequent sensor input.
If I pick the machine up off the floor and park it on its edge before the display has gone blank - thereby taking all the weight off its load cells before the microcontroller has gone back to sleep - then the display I'm obviously no longer typically paying attention to will read - Err, and the next time it wakes up it has forgotten its own weight and will overread by 2.5kg unless I trigger the 2.5kg, C, 0.0kg calibration sequence first. Which I now do every time I use it, because I can't guarantee that whoever put it away last has given it enough time to shut down on its own first.
If it was always kept flat on the floor instead of being put away standing up, I wouldn't need to do this so regularly and would probably have remained mystified by this issue for years.
I still like it better than my older analog scale, both because it's more precise and because I'm heavy enough to make the dial on that old scale wrap around past maximum, but holy fuck computerized equipment has some irritating failure modes.
posted by flabdablet at 11:50 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
losing a foot
Yeah, that matters more for digital scales than analog ones. The analog type typically has a fairly rigid chassis that the feet (if any) attach to, so although losing a foot can cause some warping and throw the reading off a little, the manual zeroing dial usually has enough range to compensate for most of that.
Digital scales typically have floating feet with a load cell on each one, the readings from which get added up numerically. Exactly how the computer will react if one of those load cells sees a reading of zero is going to be a bit unpredictable, especially if the weight being carried by the remaining cells then comes close to the top of their measurement capacity.
posted by flabdablet at 12:27 AM on April 14 [1 favorite]
Yeah, that matters more for digital scales than analog ones. The analog type typically has a fairly rigid chassis that the feet (if any) attach to, so although losing a foot can cause some warping and throw the reading off a little, the manual zeroing dial usually has enough range to compensate for most of that.
Digital scales typically have floating feet with a load cell on each one, the readings from which get added up numerically. Exactly how the computer will react if one of those load cells sees a reading of zero is going to be a bit unpredictable, especially if the weight being carried by the remaining cells then comes close to the top of their measurement capacity.
posted by flabdablet at 12:27 AM on April 14 [1 favorite]
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posted by fake at 7:28 AM on April 12 [4 favorites]