In this episode of Leading the Weigh, we walk through the truck scale buyers guide and address some of the key subjects that truck scale buyers often ask. We also try to answer some of the questions that buyers often don’t think to ask. You can follow along by viewing the truck scale buyers guide pdf.
Erica (00:31)
Hi, thank you for joining us. Today on our episode, we are going to be walking through the truck scale buyer’s guide, how to buy a truck scale. I’m Erica and this is Kevin, Let’s get started.
All right, let’s go through some truck scale basics.
Kevin Lamberth (00:47)
All right. Well, with the truck scale, as You’ve got the the concrete foundation with that you pour that the truck scale sits on. The weighbridge.
which is another word for the truck scale itself. Then you’ve got the the
load cells are inside the weighbridge. And then you have the indicator which displays the weight. And then your accessories like your remote display or your printer, things like that. And and then they also include junction boxes, which most of the time, most scales you have a junction box or two
And
and that’s really the bulk of the components
Erica (01:26)
All right, let’s talk about truck scale site planning. What’s important to consider?
Kevin Lamberth (01:36)
it’s important to put some thought into this ahead of time. When you’re thinking about where you’re gonna put your truck scale, you need to think about the scale itself, which is usually seventy foot long, but sometimes longer, eighty foot or a hundred foot. But so you need to think about that. But then also it’s not just the size of the scale, it’s also the approaches. You have to have approaches on both sides where the truck is going to drive on the scale or drive off the scale. And so you’ve got to think about that as well. And so you need, relatively level flat area when you add it all up for the scale and then the approaches. And then also you gotta think about the area that you’re driving to, you there’s got to be room for the truck to load or unload. Turn around whatever they’re gonna do and go back across the scale. And so all of those are things you need to think about when you’re planning where you’re gonna put your scale.
Erica (02:38)
I think a good discussion point would be having a flow map
Kevin Lamberth (02:49)
I think so. I’ve always thought it made sense
Erica (03:37)
let’s talk about choosing the foundation type.
Kevin Lamberth (03:44)
Well, used to back in the day, you a lot of people had a a pit. They would pour a concrete pit and they would put a truck scale in a pit because most truck scales were mechanical. And but that was back years ago. Now the vast majority of truck scales are all electronic and so you mostly just use a regular above ground truck scale with a foundation.
Erica (04:09)
Okay. anything else you want to mention about foundation?
Kevin Lamberth (04:14)
Well, it’s important to make sure that you have the foundation done by a reputable good contractor who’s gonna do it right and pour the concrete and and set the forms and everything and make sure it’s done right because ultimately that’s what the scale is going to sit on and you wanna make sure everything’s measured right and done correctly because you don’t wanna do all this and then a few months later or a few years later you’ve got cracks in the foundation
Erica (04:54)
Any advice on finding a group that would lay a foundation like that for you? So you’re saying knowledgeable professionals that have done this before?
Kevin Lamberth (05:17)
Yes, or some customers do it themselves, but you just want to make sure you have a s solid person doing the foundation for you.
Erica (05:26)
All right. Let’s talk weights and measurement agencies and regulations.
Kevin Lamberth (06:09)
Well, with this, you just I think you just mainly you want to make sure you choose a legal for trade truck scale in most applications. That’s what we deal with. So that’s ninety nine point nine percent of the truck scales we sell fall under that. Most customers these days buy a steel deck truck scale and the reason for that is most of the time because they can get the scale and have it installed and then be weighing within a day or so once once the scale arrives.
Erica (07:00)
Okay, it also mentions that steel decks are easier to relocate.
Kevin Lamberth (06:51)
Yes, they’re easier to move if you ever had to move your scale.
Erica (07:09)
So cost must come into play here. If you’re saying that the steel deck has greater advantages than the concrete deck, it seems like it’s a no brainer to choose a steel deck. Am I correct?
Kevin Lamberth (07:22)
Well they both they both have their trade offs. The steel deck is gonna be is more expensive out of the out of the gate because you’re you’re buying a complete scale ready to go.And the concrete deck scale is less expensive, but then you’ve got to factor in the cost of the concrete that you’re gonna use to to make the deck.
Erica (07:42)
And the wait time to for the concrete to cure. So important considerations. let’s talk system accessories. What are we looking at here?
Kevin Lamberth (07:53)
Well most most truck scales you have the digital weight indicator, which is a not really an accessory, but that’s part of the system. But then with that, you’re usually gonna have a ticket printer and you’ll have a remote display and that’s the standard truck scale. And then sometimes instead of having those things, you’ll have like a kiosk where someone can drive up on the scale and press a button and they’ll get a printout right there on the scale. that’s that’s one way of doing it. sometimes there’s software, sometimes there’s you can have the the digital weight indicator connected to a computer and have the software and you can store your your trucks and all that. Sometimes you’ll have a remote display with stop and go lights as well on it. So you can direct your truck traffic to stop and then go when they’ve got a the weight’s been recorded correctly. So that’s something you can do. And then the guide rails is another one that’s most of the time you want to buy the guide rails on the truck scale and you’ve got two different versions. Usually there’s one lower guide rail and then there’s a double pipe guide rail as well.
Erica (09:14)
Let’s talk truck scale quality and protection. Obviously there’s an advantage to buying a quality truck scale initially. But can you talk about maintenance and some of the decisions that are made?
Kevin Lamberth (09:37)
When you buy a truck scale, there’s different ways that people look at it. I like to look at the anticipated trucks per day that you’re going to weigh.I think that’s one one good way to measure. And not just today, but try to think down the road five, ten years from now, how many trucks do you expect to go across the scale every day? And if you if that number is a certain number, then that’s that helps you to decide what direction to go in what scale you’re going to buy. So if I’m only weighing ten trucks a a week or ten trucks every couple of days, I can probably buy a a light duty scale and be fine.
On the reverse of that, if I’ve got two hundred plus trucks going across every day and maybe more in the future, I’m gonna have to look at buying either a standard truck scale or even maybe even one that’s a little bit more heavy duty to be able to handle that truck traffic. Because you don’t want to underestimate and then end up having to buy a new scale, ten years from now. And if you if you if you spec it out right truck scale hopefully would last you twenty five years ideally. But you would look at the anticipated trucks per day. You’d also look at things like the CLC rating that the that they use for the scale. You also look at the the top deck plate thickness.
Erica (11:47)
Yeah, and and along those same lines, the preventative maintenance that you can do. I know there’s something that you recommend customers do.
Kevin Lamberth (11:55)
Yeah, One of the biggest problems that truck scales have is build up under the scale platform. And so the scale owners can walk around and look at that on a certain periodic time, whether it’s weekly, monthly, whatever, and just look and see, it’s is there any build up and then they can carefully remove that. And that’s one of the biggest problems you see with truck scales.
Erica (12:21)
All right, good to know. And also service technicians, when would they need to be involved?
Kevin Lamberth (12:29)
It’s a good idea to have your scales checked at least a couple of times a year just because the scale technician is gonna have experience and they’re going to pick up on things that the average person or the average scale owner probably wouldn’t catch. I know we’ve seen things like nicks in cables and things like that.
Erica (12:52)
Let’s discuss weighbridge strength, design and capacity.
Kevin Lamberth (13:04) You want to discuss with your your scale company, have a discussion what scales that they would recommend and what you think would work best for your situation. And it goes back to what I said about the average trucks per day and what you what they think you should do and what you feel like you should do. As long as you work with your scale company and you work with reputable brands that build truck scales, you should be in good shape.
Although I I have to admit I looked last week online at something about truck scales and I saw like an e commerce listing for a truck scale where you could literally go and buy a truck scale online with your credit card, add it to cart and all that stuff. And there’s a lot of things you can buy online. Truck scales are not one of them I would recommend. I would recommend talking to your local scale company, because they’re going to be the ones installing it and and servicing it. you don’t wanna buy a truck scale on using your shopping cart, in my opinion.
Erica (14:11)
Good advice. Let’s get into it with load cells and mounting systems. What can you explain what is a load cell?
Kevin Lamberth (15:04)
The load cell is what measures the the weight when the truck drives on the scale. And this is one of the key categories that that you have to look at when you’re buying a truck scale these days, because there’s there’s about three different options out in the market. And they’re all three good choices. It just depends on your particular application.
The traditional analog load cell is what we’ve used for years and we’ve sold truck scales to this day with analog load cells and they do they do well. They do fine. They’re good scales. if there is a disadvantage with these, it would be that they’re they’re a little more susceptible to lightning damage, but they do well, they’ve they’ve been a good product for many, many years. One step above that would be a digital truck scale or digital load cell. The advantage with it would be that you have diagnostics with the indicator where if you you can look at the indicator and it’ll almost guide you to what’s where the problem is if there is a problem. And so it makes it easier potentially to troubleshoot and fix a problem. And also there much better against lightning damage. And they have the ability in most cases to store the calibration in the load cell and in the indicator. So theoretically you could if you had a bad load cell, you could swap the load cell out and keep going and change a few settings and you you could change it yourself and be be up and going. Although there are some some stipulations where you would have to have the scale recalibrated with a technician and a truck.
The downside with the digital would be that it’s proprietary and there’s only a few people that offer it right now. And so it kind of limits some of your product availability and who can work on it and If there was ever we haven’t had it, but if there was ever a supply chain issue, then you could have trouble if you needed to get a certain part. And let’s say the batch of cables or a batch of load cells had a problem, there’s nowhere else to go to get So that’s one one downside. And and then hydraulic is the other choice. You have hydraulic truck scales. And that’s a good choice, especially in locations where you have bad bad weather like in the summer, lightning damage and things like that. A hydraulic truck scale could work really good in that situation. The downside with hydraulic is they’re more expensive and some scale companies don’t have as much experience working with those items. And, we’ve had issues in the past with the hydraulic. It’s not a huge thing. But we have had a a situation in the past where we had problems getting a particular part and it’s same same deal as digital. If anybody ever has a supply chain issue, you could have an issue getting the items you need.
Erica (18:25)
So which type of technology should I use?
Kevin Lamberth (18:29)
You should discuss this with your scale company and you should discuss the options and decide what you feel good about and what scale company recommends. But I’m always reminded when I read pages like this with all the different load cell technology, I’m always reminded of a social media post from years ago where they asked scale people, people in the industry, if you had to put a truck scale in, what would you put in? And you would think the answer would be there would be a consensus, but no. There was all different kinds of answers. You had you had people that were a hundred percent on hydraulic, you had people that wanted digital, you had people that wanted analog. I think you even had people that wanted mechanical or electro mechanical. I mean it was just it was all over the place. So There there really is no one right answer. I think it depends on what you think from your experience and what your scale company recommends.
Erica (19:56)
All right. Let’s talk truck scale calibration.
Kevin Lamberth (20:00)
Well, you want to have your scale checked and calibrated, I would say at least a couple times a year is a good a good guideline for truck scales. It kind of depends on how much you’re using it, how important the scale is to you, but I would say two to four times a year is generally a good good average starting point.
Erica (20:24)
All right. And along those lines, we’ve already discussed this a little bit, but how long does installation usually take? You’ve already outlined the concrete deck versus the steel deck.
Kevin Lamberth (20:49)
Well, like they mentioned in the in the book, it’s the installation is similar for each. For a concrete deck and a steel deck, the installation itself is similar. the difference is the the time to pour the concrete and and make the actual concrete deck. But normally if you buy let’s say you buy a steel deck truck scale, you would buy it, you would have the foundation poured. Usually the truck scale, the lead time can vary anywhere from a couple weeks to forty weeks, depending on various factors, but normally there’ll be enough time in there where you can the foundation, get that all right, let that cure.
Then the truck scale’s delivered, you offload that with a crane, set it in place. The the scale company will do that, set the scale in place and then install it. And once you get the scale off the truck and and set on the foundation, usually it can be installed and a three quarters of a day maybe or a half day, maybe a day. Depends on how big a scale it is and different factors. But usually you can be up and and weighing in that one day basically once you get the scale delivered and installed and then the technicians can install it and then they can run the truck and the cart and test it and you can be weighing that day usually.
Erica (23:09)
Any final words or advice on choosing a truck scale or this whole process?
Kevin Lamberth (23:20)
Get your local scale company’s advice. Because they’ve been in business for many years in most cases, and they they know what what scales are the the best choices and they have experience dealing with that. And so I would recommend working with a reputable scale company in your area. and then, you you install the scale, you want to make sure that you install it where you have good drainage. Because build up is gonna be one of the biggest problems you have. So, you want to make sure you set the scale up to where it it has a good area for drainage, so you’re not gonna have a bunch of build up under it all the time.
Erica (25:11)
Something you’ve mentioned in the past that I thought should also be mentioned here is at the very beginning we were talking about having a flow map for the design. And in the past you’ve mentioned having a point person, a designated person that is the contact, the point of contact for the decision making. And can you speak to that.
Kevin Lamberth (25:35)
Anytime that you’re trying to figure out where you’re going to install a large item like a truck scale, you need to have a limited number of people that can make the call or make the decision. As the scale person, you don’t want to have multiple people that are telling you different things. We need to have one consensus of the scale’s gonna go here and we don’t need to have, one person says it’s gonna go over here and one person’s got it over here.There needs to be ideally one person, maybe a couple of people, It’s not gonna be very productive if you’ve got a committee of people you’ve gotta go through to figure out, where this is gonna go, where that’s gonna go, are are we gonna have all these accessories or no accessories? There needs to be hopefully one person or maybe two that are gonna be the ones that make the calls on all this and not a committee.opefully it’s all going to be.
That makes sense. Well, Kevin, thank you for joining us and thank you for going through truck scale buying basics today. And if you have more questions, we would invite you to visit ourwebsite at centralcarolinascale.com. And if you’re located in central North Carolina, we’d love to work with you. Thanks for watching.
Hopefully this episode of Leading the Weigh helped you out as we walked through the truck scale buyers guide and addressed some of the key subjects that truck scale buyers often ask. Be sure to contact our sales department for more information by calling (919) 776-7737 or by completing the request for quote form on our website.