Replacing a Kitchen Scale

When I started university, I remember getting a kitchen scale as I no longer could the one from home. Now, after nearly a decade of heavy use, being more than once covered in water or flour, it starts to slowly no longer function predictably. Which, one could argue, is the entire job of a scale.

Now there is the choice: with what to replace the scale. Should I just get a similar one and hope that it lasts another decade? Or try to get an industrial scale to avoid the problem of the scale turning off mid-measurement? Anyone that ever had that happen knows how annoying this is, especially if you measure everything into the same bowl to save on dishes.

It ended up being the third option. Coinciding with all this, my plans were to get a coffee scale, and the Booko Themis Ultra Kickstarter showed up. With their reputation, the Kickstarter early bird price, and timing, why not. The disadvantage of being an early hardware adopter was that, initially, the scale was drifting seemingly randomly. Luckily, with taking the scale once apart to make sure that the sides do not touch the core, and some firmware updates, this now seems to be gone.

Does this scale make a good kitchen scale? After now a few months of use: kinda. It is quick, accurate, and it is built to be waterproof, so the design is actually easy to clean. Also, the fact that it charges via USB-C is nice. Just the thing that makes it a great coffee scale makes it a suboptimal kitchen scale: its form factor. If you put a normal mixing bowl on top of it, you can't read the numbers. While you can use the app to see them again, who wants that while cooking? The scale still works good enough for cooking, to not need an immediate replacement. I still stand by that a big scale and a small accurate scale work well in combination, but we will revisit this topic probably in the future again.