Grading your eggs the easy way

[Ohhhdear]

I was looking around for an egg scale, and couldn't quite stomach shelling out $25+ for what amounts to a simple spring scale with a fancy design. I checked eBay and Craiglist and a bunch of the stores advertised here on BYC. One store advertised several spring egg scales and also a small digital scale to which they added a wooden egg cup, for $50+!!

Then I got to thinking.... I have an old digital postage scale that weighs in fractions of ounces. I have a porcelain egg cup, or a little glass dish. All I had to do was turn on the postage scale, set the dish on the top tray and hit "Tare" to zero out the weight of the dish.

I went online to Wikipedia to "Eggs" and found a chart listing the USA weights for the various sizes of eggs, from Jumbo to Peewee. They also list Canada, Australia, Europe and a few other places' size/weight charts. They also give the USDA grading for AA, A and B eggs. Very helpful!

So, I weighed the eggs and lightly pencil J, XL, or L on the top of each egg. I get 10-12 eggs a day, so it's not many to do. Makes a difference when ladies at the farm stand look into the carton and see that yes, these eggs are comparable in size to store-bought, and a whole lot nicer.

Here's what the chart said about sizes/weights for the USA: (the weights & sometimes names vary for other countries)
Jumbo .....................Greater than 2.5 oz or 71 g
Very Large/XLarge....Greater than 2.25 oz or 64 g
Large.......................Greater than 2 oz or 57 g
Medium...................Greater than 1.75 oz or 50 g
Small..................... Greater than 1.5 oz or 43 g
PeeWee...................Greater than 1.25 oz or 35 g

Maybe this is old news to y'all, but this is my first flock and it's pretty exciting seeing just how efficient my girls are making yummy eggs!

 

[Mac in Wisco]

We have a couple of these that I bought on E-Bay for about $25 each. We do a couple thousand eggs each day and these scales are pretty fast as they settle out rather quickly. The model is Salter 1250.

 

[Cheep]

I like the postal scale idea, since I already have one - thank you.

 

[HBuehler]

We use one much like that..however it's sizing not grading.Grading is age and condition of the shell and blemishes nothing to do with size.Here we only sell XL and Jumbo eggs so we weigh every egg and every dozen we have which can be lots of eggs!