When measuring things, it is important to pick a suitable level of precision. For example, when I drove to Bangor (Wales) last week, it was enough to know it was about 160 miles from home. The car estimated I had about 140 miles range in the tank so I knew that I needed to fill up enroute. It would have been unnecessary and silly to try and pin a more precise figure on it.

My trusty kitchen scales allegedly offer precision to the nearest half gram but that can waver up or down on the display and I’m not convinced that it is highly accurate. When I need to measure 500g of flour, being a gram or two off is negligible but, if I need 10g of yeast or salt, there are cases where I would like to be more precise.

That’s why I finally purchased a set of precision scales a couple of weeks ago. They are really quite inexpensive and I’d estimate that they are reasonably accurate. In theory, I can weigh things out to two decimal places, which is far more precision than I need for any cooking or home brewing application. However, it does mean that I can be more confident when weighing things to the nearest half gram, where being a few 1/100ths out is as insignificant as straying by a gram or two on larger amounts.