Review on Smart Weigh CSB5KG Digital Multifunction by Sally Willyard

Bought this kitchen scale for my wife to cook for the holidays. What you can read before you buy: This food scale has a mode button. If you press the mode button for a few seconds, it will switch to "cal" mode. If you press it again and remember to exit, the "cal" indicator will start flashing. Now you're officially in big trouble: he wants you to put a calibrated 3kg weight on him to recalibrate his gauges! Standing in the kitchen has a standard weight of 3 kg! Smart Weigh ignores this and cleverly exits this mode, and now you have a scale that thinks a piece of paper weighs a pound and a half! Then you start looking in the manual for a factory reset option and unfortunately there isn't one. At this point you have a completely useless scale, you must either return it or find 3 kg standard weight to restore "caliber". Needless to say, my wife was very disappointed. Read on if you want a happy ending: I vaguely remembered from high school physics that a cubic centimeter of water weighs about 1 gram at room temperature. So I found an empty 1 gallon plastic bottle and filled it with 3000ml of water using a measuring cup. Now I have an object that weighs about 3 kg. Just to test this circuit, I recreated the calibration mode with this water bottle, and after that the smart weight readings became realistic. I then took this bottle of water to the post office self help scale and added/subtracted enough water to make exactly 6 pounds 9.8 ounces which equaled 3 kg. Using a freshly calibrated 3kg water bottle, I ran the Smart Weigh calibration mode again and after that it provided measurements that matched those from our local supermarket. My wife was so impressed that she promised to bake my favorite pastries next weekend!