Hi.

If anyone's considering buying one of those expensive Salter Electronic
Kitchen Scales, you'll probably want to be aware of a design problem
that messes up the accuracy. You can work around the problem, and still
get accurate readings, but it is a rather daft fault. This is what I've
put on Salter's feedback form, and I'm waiting for their reply:

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I bought one of your 1004 "Electronic kitchen scales with stainless
steel platform" about a year ago and I was very happy with it. However,
it developed a fault, and I had it replaced under guarantee with a new
one. Unfortunately, I am far from happy with the behaviour of the new
scale and I have found what I believe is a serious design fault that has
been introduced into it.

I noticed that when I was measuring powders or liquids, that I was
ending up with quantities that were visibly too large for the displayed
weight. When I then transferred the powder or liquid to some old
balance scales that were cumbersome but accurate, I found that the
quantities were as much as 20% too high.

I then investigated the problem, and found that the scale misreads if
the powder or liquid is added too slowly. I presume that this is because
a software change has been introduced into the scale's electronics to
try to compensate for drifting errors in the weight sensors.

Didn't it occur to the designers that the natural way to use a kitchen
scale is to put a bowl on the scale, zero it, pour in most of the
quantity of powder that is required, then slowly add the rest to bring
it up to the target weight. If you do this however, the scale
under-reads. The only way to get around this behaviour, and to get a
reasonably accurate reading, is to press a spoon into the powder for a
moment, when adding small quantities, to make a large change to the
weight which disables this software trick.

I have to say that this has made the scale much harder to use and is
very irritating. I'd like to return the scale for one that behaves the
way that the old scale did. Before I do however, I'd like to know if any
are available, or do all of your kitchen scales now have this misleading
drift compensation thing?

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--
Farry