How to Reset Your Scale

When you’re mixing your own nutrients, your scale is your best friend. However, if your scale isn’t accurate, it can be your worst enemy. Fortunately, resetting and calibrating your own scale is a quick and easy endeavor. 

Trust us, this process should only take a few seconds once you’re acquainted with your scale. 

Get your scale out

First, get your scale out and power it on. 

Many scales automatically start at a measurement of 0.00. If yours doesn’t, don’t worry, you’ll reset it soon (and double check it to make sure it’s measuring properly).

Put your tray on the scale

Whether you purchase your own bowl or tray for weighing, or your scale comes with one, it still adds weight. Naturally, this means that any measurement you take with the added weight of the scale will be way off. 

See the example here:

The tray alone weighs 32.4 grams.

Take out the tray weight

To accurately measure your ingredients, you need to get rid of the added weight of the tray. While you could go the long route and do some complicated math, you can also do yourself a favor and skip all that. 

Your scale should have a button labeled “T” or “Tare.” 

This button essentially tells your scale to start from zero, and negate the weight of anything currently on the scale. 

 

See how the scale now reads “0” even with the tray on top of it. 

Start measuring

Once your scale stays steadily on 0 (with the tray or measuring bowl on it), you can start measuring. In this photo, we measured out 6 grams of NaCl (AKA regular table salt). Because the scale was reset before measuring, we know that 6 grams is an accurate measurement. 

What if you don’t reset or calibrate your scale?

Using the examples from above, we know that the tray weighs about 32.4 grams, while the salt we measured out weighs 6 grams. 

If you don’t use the tare function and reset your scale, your measurements can be vastly inaccurate. This photo shows the same amount of salt measured on the scale. However, in this case, the scale wasn’t recalibrated. As a result, the final (albeit inaccurate) measurement shows 38.4 grams.

Here’s the short and simple version:

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