A Story About A Scale Calibration Goof & How To Fix It

I recently had a pretty embarrassing goof, and I’ll share it with you all in the spirit of hoping no one else makes a similar blunder. Grab your favorite drink and read along, but I’ll warn you that you may want to hold off on that big gulp until you are finished reading!

I had decided to make a list of all my soap molds and the volume each would hold. But when I made soap in the amount I’d determined would fill my loaf mold almost to the top, it came up short. I thought I must have made a mistake in figuring the volume, so I asked for help.

That pound of butter is suspiciously heavy.

That’s when things got embarrassing.

Poor Andee went over every aspect of my figures, and she was stumped. Finally, she asked me if I had calibrated my scale. I told her of course I had! That’s the first thing I did when taking it out of the box. I was sure it was accurate, but I grabbed my calibration mass and went through the steps again. No change in the weights.

She asked me if I had a pound of butter. I thought that was a strange question, but yes, I had a pound of butter. Weigh it, she said, and take a picture.

I set the pound of butter on the scale, and it weighed 3.138 pounds! WHAT?! That can’t be right!

Exactly.

(Cue Tina singing her hilarious calibration song.)

That’s more like it!

Andee walked me through the steps of calibrating the scale, which I was sure I had done correctly. Well, except for one crucial thing. I did not realize my calibration mass was 2 kg or 2000 grams, and my scale automatically defaults to 6000 g. So naturally, my scale was correctly weighing – but it was 4000 g off. UGH!

After proper calibration, that same pound of butter weighed 1.052 pounds. That’s more like it!

The moral of the story is that calibration is crucial, but it also helps to know what you’re doing while calibrating! If the weight of something is not matching the expected volume, you may have a problem.

Maybe this would be a good time to check your own scale and recalibrate it. Don’t find out the hard way!

P.S. I’ve also learned that 4 ounces of a solid at room temperature butter like Shea Butter or Almond Butter should look like the same volume as a stick of butter! Now I know what to look for when weighing my recipes.