Maintaining A Healthy Lawn

Why Having Two Balances Is Always Better

12 October 2016 by Katrina Evans

If you're in charge of ordering equipment and maintaining it for a lab, factory, or any other facility that requires small amounts of materials to be weighed, the balances you use could make or break your work. If one balance starts to give you a lot of trouble, it's a good idea to replace it. However, instead of ordering just one, you may want to start adding spare balances to your order form as well. This is about more than just giving a manufacturer more of your money. Having an extra balance available in the same area of the facility can increase productivity and help ensure what you're measuring is correct.

Verify Calibration Status

One of the bigger problems that facilities have is that balances go out of calibration regularly, but it's hard to tell if something has happened. This can be partly avoided by doing a brief calibration exercise each morning, but that doesn't prevent the scale from going out of whack during the day. If the scale is older or defective, that can be a real risk.

If you think something is happening to the balance frequently, being able to move the material you're trying to weigh to another balance in the same area is invaluable. The other balance could need calibration too, of course, but it would not drift off by the same amount in the same time as the first balance. If a material is too fragile to be transported to another area of the facility that has a scale, you wouldn't be able to simply transfer it and check the weight. But with another balance nearby, it's a snap to double-check the weight of the material and see if something is wrong with your main balance.

Keep the Work Going

An additional balance is important if there is so much work going on in an area of the facility that people are lining up to use the balance. The faster people can access the balances and weight materials, and the less pressure there is to hurry up with the weighing, the better the productivity from that division. The same goes for broken balances; if one breaks, you have another ready to go and don't have to stop your work.

Technically you could say that about any equipment. But it's not really feasible for large pieces. Balances, though, tend to have small footprints that take up little room on a tabletop. If you're going to try to have double of any piece of equipment, a balance is the best bet.

Talk to your equipment suppliers about small, inexpensive balances that you can keep on hand as a secondary scale. You'll find there are many affordable, well-made options that don't take up a lot of space. For more information, contact local professionals like Strack Scale Services.

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