Known weight of a household item

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We have a digital scale in our master bathroom which I use pretty infrequently, maybe once every 3-4 months. My weight doesn’t fluctuate much- for the past 5 or 6 years I’ve been anywhere from 161-165, or somewhere in between. Typically I’m 163.something- 163.3 and 163.7 are the most common. This is the case regardless of what I do.

This morning I clocked in at 169.6. I never in my life have been that heavy, and it’s just surprising because just last week I was 163. I can’t imagine that I’ve put on the weight, and I don’t look or feel any different. My wife things the scale is going screwy so I decided to weigh something that I actually know the weight of, just to see if it’s accurate.

And therein lies the dilemma. I can’t find anything in my house with a known weight. My wife has a dumbbell in the basement that nobody has used in over a decade, with 2 removable plates on each side that weigh 3 lbs each. I put the four plates on the scale but I guess it’s too light and it won’t register anything below a certain minimum weight. Then I started thinking about it- what is there in the typical home that has an actual, known weight?

Do you have any such thing, and what is it?

2

Weigh yourself with and without the dumbbell to find the weight of the dumbbell.

Most canned goods come in 16-ounce sizes. Again, if your scale won’t weigh stuff less than a minimum weight, then you will have to weigh yourself with and without one or more cans.

A gallon of water weighs about 8.3 pounds.

3

Yeah, but at this point I’m less concerned with the mystery of the scale, and more curious how many things in the typical household have a known weight. Like, “c’mon, corkboard, every idiot knows that the standard whatchamacallit weighs 34.8 lbs”, sort of thing.

4

Use the water. That’s easy enough.

5

A pint’s a pound the world around!

6

Is your scale electronic? If yes, try changing the batteries. If not, try a 5 pound bag of sugar or flour?

7

dogfood.
Even if the scale has a minimum and wont register a 3-lb barbell, you can buy a bag of chow that weighs more than a child.

8

Mostly food - dog food, flour, sugar, etc.

9

Do you have a bowling ball? Weights vary but 16 pounds is fairly standard for decent bowlers.

10

Nope. With apologies to Mr. (Alton) Brown, a pint of water weights enough more than a pound that you’d be inaccurate. 8 pints = 8.35 pounds.

Also, most bathroom scales are not accurate over their entire range, anyway, so you’d have to get enough water to approximate the 160 pounds you’re looking at (about 20 gallons) and subtract the container weight.

11

And, of course Imperial pints are about 20% more than that.

12

And don’t forget metric pints, which are guaranteed to make any scale self destruct.

13

I don’t think Alton Brown came up with that. My dad’s been saying it forever.

So is a cup of water not 8oz? Or is two cups not a pint?

14

This thread in GD talks about the limits of home scales and how to test their accuracy

15

Yep. Kitty litter (20lb), sugar (5 lbs), sacks of concrete (well, I have some) (80 lbs).

16

Oh, yeah, didn’t think about home improvement stuff - sand, concrete, even plumber’s putty.

17

I don’t know how many typical households have a 50 lb sack of concrete hanging around. Also, is an 80 lb bag of dog food really 80 lbs? Could it vary between, say, 76 and 83 lbs? I don’t have a pet so I wouldn’t know. I was really wondering what generally available item is the exact weight it’s supposed to be.

18

Gestalt linked to a relevant thread above. The post there that caught my attention is this one.

It recommended using water. You’ll need a measuring cup, a milk jug or small bucket, and a waterproof trash container.

  1. Measure a gallon of water into the milk jug and mark the height. Dump it into the waterproof trash basket (sitting on the scale.)

  2. Refill the milk jug up to the gallon mark and dump it into the wastebasket. Repeat until you’ve got some substantial weight in the wastebasket. One gallon = 8.35 lbs., so 15 gallons = 125.25.

  3. Deduct the weight of the empty waste basket. (Weigh yourself with and without the waste basket to see how much it weighs.)

That will let you test the accuracy of the scale against a known weight of water.

19

If we’re worried that “1 gallon of water = 8 lbs” is not accurate enough (it’s within 5% of the correct answer), then I’d expect most objects you find around the house with a nominal weight will be just as problematic.

Of course, that point may be moot since we know a more accurate figure for water’s density (I can never remember exactly, but 8.3 and 8.35 lb/gal have both been offered in this thread). So using water is probably the simplest way.

Just make sure you’re measuring the volume of the water accurately! Are those little hash marks inside the plastic bucket accurate to within 5 percent? I’d be skeptical without checking it out first on the particular bucket I’d be using. You could probably assume that a gallon of bottled water would be sufficiently accurate, so you could use that to calibrate your bucket…

(On preview, see that this is pretty much what Baal Houtham is suggesting…)

20

Not suggesting that my home is typical in any way but I have several heavy iron plates marked at 100 pounds each and intended to weigh down the front of a tractor.

More convenient and probably more rational, I just bought a new, 25 pound sack of brown rice.