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Maintaining Medical Scales: 5 Ways to Care for Your Scale
Proper medical scale maintenance is a critical component of a scale’s accuracy and performance. Use these five tips to help ensure lasting scale accuracy.
Proper medical scale maintenance is a critical component of a scale’s accuracy, longevity and overall performance. Rice Lake Weighing Systems recommends using these five tips to promote the well-being of your scale.
1. Find the Best Place for Your Scale
- When choosing where to place your scale, ensure it will be located on a flat, hard surface and avoid padded or thick carpeted floors.
- If a scale is placed on a surface that isn’t level or properly supported, weight readings may be inaccurate.
2. Perform Basic Scale Maintenance
- Check the overall appearance of the scale to make sure there are no obvious signs of damage.
- Inspect the condition of the AC adapter. Make sure it is intact and safe to use.
- Change the batteries when low-level annunciator is indicated on the display.
- Only use AC adapter supplied or recommended by scale manufacturer.
3. Thoroughly Clean Your Scale. Proper care and cleaning are essential to ensuring a long life of accurate and effective operation.
- Before starting the cleaning process, be sure to turn the power off and disconnect the scale from the AC power source if using the adapter.
- Clean all external surfaces with a clean, damp cloth or tissue. Mild soap and water solution may be used.
- Dry with a clean, soft cloth.
- Do not immerse the scale in cleaning or other liquid solutions.
4. Store Your Scale in a Safe Place
- Store your medical scales in a clean, dry place when they are not in use.
- Avoid areas with high humidity and potential for water on the scale.
5. Learn How to Check Your Scale. It is important to check your scale for accuracy to make sure it’s ready to meet healthcare weighing standards.
- Using bodyweight or consumer barbell weights may not result in true accuracy.
- Use only certified calibration weights to guarantee your scale’s reading is correct.
- Refer to the scale manufacturers manual for information about the recommended test weight percentage of your scale’s capacity. Rice Lake recommends checking your scale with 10% of the scale’s capacity or 100 lb on a routine basis. This will establish a baseline and determine if a scale is within acceptable tolerances or needs to be re-calibrated.
- Do not shock load or drop weights onto the scale.
- Always place weights in the center of the scale.
Follow these suggestions from Rice Lake to ensure you’re getting the best use out of your healthcare scale. Rice Lake is an industry-leading medical scale solutions provider dedicated to offering safe, accurate, high-quality products for care facilities of all kinds. To learn more about our comprehensive line of medical scales, visit www.ricelake.com/health.