Every now and then I like to browse a few websites and see what other scales are out there on the market. We used to call that surfing the web back in the day. Anyway, I stumbled onto Amazon looking for some pallet scales. It was interesting to see some of the offerings and price ranges. Below is one example.
PEC FS Series Professional Grade Steel Floor Scale – Heavy-Duty Pallet Scale with Indicator for Warehouse Shipping and Heavy Duty Industrial Weighing – 10000x1lb – 48 x 48 — Current Price is $685 with free delivery.
As you may know, we offer cheap floor scales as well. I have never heard of PEC. In looking at their items, it seems they are offering a mix of Prime and Optima scale options with their name printed on the scale. In this example, the floor scales are listed as a professional grade and are ideal for heavy-duty industrial or shipping and is commonly used for warehouse pallet weighing.
The scale is listed as highly accurate and includes (4) NTEP approved alloy load cells. They do not tell us what brand of NTEP load cells the scale actually uses. The FS professional grade floor scale system has a digital indicator with serial output, 15′ load cell cable, and a ABS NEMA 4X junction box with excitation trim board. The junction box is plastic and I’m not sure about the 4x rating… The scale is sold with a 30 day full refund, a 12-month warranty, and lifetime technical support.
So let’s break this down. This lineup of scales uses a couple of different weight indicators that are low cost devices. The plastic “902” style readout is popular for things like non-ntep floor scales and vet scales but is definitely one of the cheaper weight displays on the market today. The load cell cable it uses is also a thin style cable that could be more prone to damage. The other “Prime” PS-IN202 style indicator looks similar to a TI500E but in our experience, for whatever reason, they don’t tend to work as well as the traditional 500E unit. Again that is based on our past experiences with this instrument. Your experience could differ. I will say that I like these indicators better than some of the past generations of cheap indicators like the old P2000 or XK3190-A12 that were imported from overseas.
The scale platform itself actually looks pretty good from what I can tell. Overall, this is a decent looking platform scale for folks looking to simply weigh pallets that are coming and going through the warehouse and don’t need a legal for trade weight scale.
In past entries like this, we also like to look at the price breakdown too. So lets crunch some numbers. Your sale price is $685. Of course the big A will get their commission for each sale. I’m not sure what that amount will be but just remember they receive some amount. Free delivery means the shipping costs are included in the price. So that means there is somewhere around a $200 freight charge built into the pricing. So that brings us down to approximately $485.
So looking at the equipment pricing…. if you bought in bulk, a cheap weight indicator might be around $125. A Locosc LP7110 NTEP shear beam load cell might be around $150 each. This scale has four of the load cells, one in each corner. A plastic junction box with summing board is around $80. 15 foot long load cell cables are usually around $50. Then there is cost of the actual platform itself. Don’t forget to account for the warranty and lifetime tech support as well. And of course, the seller has to make a little money too. So, obviously there are some corners being cut somewhere in order to offer this deal at this $685 price point.
My top concerns with this scale would be (1) Load Cell quality (2) Indicator quality and (3) non-ntep status. I am curious what load cells they are using in the scale. I mentioned the indicators earlier, you could upgrade for just a little more money to a higher quality Inscale LP7510A weight indicator. And speaking of upgrading, why not go ahead and upgrade the digital readout and the scale to a NTEP quality 4×4 pallet scale. That way you know the quality, accuracy and durability are present. That’s one of the reasons we rarely sell non-ntep scales like these. We sell and recommend NTEP scales 99% of the time.
And of course we have to look at the online reviews. Mostly positive reviews overall but there are a couple of negative ones mentioning an error on weight over 1000 lb on a 5000 lb capacity scale and another mentions not returning customer texts.
So there you have it. Those are my thoughts on this “pro grade” floor scale system. It’s actually a pretty good deal for some customers. However, as I mentioned there are a few concerns that I have regarding the quality versus the price point they are able to offer. We actually offer a version of this professional grade steel floor scale ourselves if you’re interested. If you’re in the market for industrial quality floor scales be sure to visit our website and as always you can contact customer service for any questions or product recommendations. We’ve been providing customers with Professional Grade Steel Floor Scale choices since 2005.