Leo nodded. “Because you didn’t wait for the .” He pointed to the manual’s diagram: a small circle that stops blinking when the weight is steady. “If you add sugar while the scale is still settling from the flour, it guesses. Always wait for the stable symbol.”
That evening, her friend Leo, a lab technician, saw it. “That’s not junk. Did you read the manual?”
He pulled up the online. “First: zero vs. tare .” He placed a bowl on the scale. It read 245g. He pressed TARE . The display went to zero. “Now the bowl is ignored. Add flour.” He poured until it read 500g. Perfect.
Finally, he flipped to the troubleshooting table:
Maria’s biggest issue: she’d been using the scale on a silicone mat (too squishy). The manual explicitly says: hard, flat, level surface only .
| Problem | Likely cause (from manual) | |---------|----------------------------| | Fluctuating weight | Unsteady surface or air currents | | "Err" message | Overload (over 5000g) or low battery | | Slow response | Cold environment – let it warm up |
“But last week,” Maria said, “I tared, added flour, then sugar – and the sugar reading was wrong.”