When your smart scale lies to you.

Just an FYI if you’re on the the bleeding edge of an eep on a weight goal.

Lets say you are 0.1# over on you’re morning weigh in of an eep day. So you go exercise, pee, maybe shave…anything you can do in that short of a period. Weigh in again, and get the exact same weight. (Maybe you even forgot to take you shoes off or something. You know you dropped more than 0.1!)

Well, you’re smart scale is probably lying to you…although not with evil intent. These scales are accurate, but not perfect…and if you step on with 185.34 (and see 185.3) and then again right after, it’s own error might detect then 185.37. Now if you see 185.4…well, many folks would just think the scale isn’t very accurate. And differences like that don’t actually matter much, especially on a sub-daily basis.

So the scale sees “about the same weight” (or same profile) within “some short amount of time”…and it just reloads the last measurement and shows you that instead.

Which is normally fine, but not when that 0.1# matters! You want the truth…or at least, another guess at it.

So (at least with an Aria) pop the batteries out for a minute, and then weigh in again, It’ll take a new “real” weight, and show you those results.

For better or worse…it’s possible its natural error before was in your favor. But at least you’ve got a shot.

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Fascinating! I know from long-time personal experience that Withings gives you a fresh guess each time. Check out footnote 4 of Bee’s Guide To Beeminding Weight Loss.

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Ahh, interesting…never used the Withings.

I can’t prove the Aria does that. But I’m about 95% sure (and there has been a bit of discussion on their forums) from my own experience.

You can also just pick up something that weighs a few pounds, get a bogus weight, and then put it down and weigh again. But then you get ugly data in your charts.

An edge case in any case. But its come in handy once or twice. :slight_smile:

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(At least my particular Aria purchased many years ago.)

My Aria doesn’t do this.

However, my Aria does a thing where if you move it and it needs to
self-recalibrate, the next “few” weights are about a pound high. This was
incredibly infuriating. If I moved it, I could weigh in, be a pound high,
weigh in 1 minute later, be a pound high, weigh in 1 minute later, get the
expected weight.

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I have a cheap digital scale that does this. It’s inaccurate so it just saves the last recorded weight and feeds it back to you . The Withing scale doesn’t do this. If you stand on it a second time holding a book it will report a couple of hundred grams difference.

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QueChoisir, the french equivalent to ConsumerReport, recently tested electronic and mechanic scales and evaluated the sensitivity of the scale adding 100g by 100g (from 69kg to 71kg and from 119kg to 121kg).

The best scales on sensitivity criterion were Withings WS-50 and Runtastic Libra (3 stars, very good), the WS-30 had only 1 star (medium). One of the worst scale (sensitivity criterion) was Fitbit Aria (one black square, it’s bad).

The WS-50 was the only scale getting 3 stars on every weighting criterion : accuracy, repeatability, sensitivity. A lot of scales got 3 stars on accuracy and repeatability (Aria was in that group)

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Good to know! The original Withings scale is clearly super high quality. We got ours close to 10 years ago (had to order it from France back then! I remember it being very exciting at the time to have a wifi scale finally hitting the market) and it’s still good as new.