However you score your weed, knowing how to measure what you get is crucial and when buying weight, it’s important to know how many ounces in a pound. There’s nothing worse than buying too little, or too much. And if you’re looking into converting ounces and pounds, you’re probably interested in buying a lot. So let’s lay out the basics regarding the larger units of cannabis consumption. Exactly how many ounces in a pound?
How Many Ounces In A Pound?
Let’s be honest, if you’re looking at picking up multiple ounces or even a pound of flower, it’s safe to assume people might suspect you’re buying for more people than yourself. Unless you’re committed to 24-hour smoking, it would be hard to keep a pound of weed fresh and potent long enough for a single human to get through.
But there are plenty of reasons for stocking up. The most practical one is cannabis cooking. If you’re planning on preparing edibles as your primary method of consumption, having a large volume of fresh weed on hand is a good thing. The same is true if you’re interested in any home-brewed concentrates.
Fortunately, the higher up the quantity scale you go, the easier the conversions become. Unlike converting grams to ounces, moving from ounces to pounds keeps you in the imperial system.
So how many ounces in a pound? It’s simple: 1 pound equals 16 ounces. Easy.
1 Pound = 16 Ounces
If you like numbers, let’s play around with our answer a little bit. The timeless, basic unit of buying and selling cannabis is the “eighth.” Dispensaries and the concentrates phenomenon are changing that in important ways. But for the most part, you’re dealing in 8ths.
An “eighth” stands for an eighth of an ounce. One ounce equals eight eighths of an ounce. Take a hit and say that eight times fast!
So another way of asking: how many ounces in a pound? How many eighths are in a pound?
If 8 8ths = 1 ounce, and 16 ounces = 1 pound, then 8 x 16 = 128 eighths in a pound. Yeah, that’s a lot of herb.
Why not go all the way? If an eighth ounce is equal (somewhat roughly) to 3.5 grams, there are 448 grams in a pound. Actually, a more accurate number is 3.5437 grams x 128, or 453.6 grams in a pound. Pretty wild how one small rounding down, compounded 128 times, makes you miss out on 5.6 grams of weed. That’s almost a quarter ounce!
Fortunately, buying in ounces and pounds means avoiding the metric to imperial conversion that requires rounding down in the first place. One pound is a full 16 ounces. Simple as that.
How To Accurately Weigh Large Amounts Of Weed
Now you know how to convert ounces to pounds of weed, and vice versa, you can calculate how many ounces in a pound of marijuana in multiple ways. You can even make the leap and convert grams to ounces if you need to. But can you put that knowledge into practice?
Weighing out ounces and pounds of weed requires a bit more know-how than just dropping a few buds into a tray on your scale. Without the proper technique, you’ll end up spilling weed everywhere.
In other words, accurately weighing larger quantities of weed is made easier with the best tools an equipment. Here are a few recommendations for weighing out ounces and pounds.
Should You Use A Scale To Figure Out How Many Ounces In A Pound?
The days of triple beam scales with calibration weight sets are more or less behind us. Now, digital scales are a dime a dozen. Picking out the best one for the situation is a matter of figuring out the resolution you need and the max capacity of the scale. If you are measuring ounces and pounds, get a larger, sturdier digital scale.
Resolution refers to how accurate a scale can measure. Most pocket digital scales have a tenth of a gram accuracy (0.1g). That’s perfect for measuring out eighths, which are 3.5 grams, and other fractions of an ounce.
Everyone’s accuracy needs vary, but for most people 0.1 grams is plenty. But if your accuracy demands are a bit higher, you’re in luck. The larger scales needed for measuring ounces and pounds consistently tend to have better resolutions. Typically, one hundredth of a gram (0.01g).
It may seem counter-intuitive that measuring larger amounts of cannabis would benefit from measurements down to 0.01-gram accuracy. But here’s the important point. Those scales are capable of that kind of accuracy because their load cells are better quality.
Digital scales convert the force of weight into an electric signal. And the cheap pocket scales most people use are kitted with cheap load cells—the part that does the conversion. They work just fine with small amounts of cannabis. And sure, most can go up to a kilo (1000g). But with heavier weights, accuracy decreases.
Larger scales with higher resolution, by contrast, tend to have better load cells that keep their accuracy with heavier weights. That’s what makes them better for weighing larger quantities of cannabis.
Use A Large Container To Weight Large Quantities Of Weed
Additionally, larger scales have bigger platforms capable of holding many ounces or pounds of weed at once. And that leads to a second important tip. Use a container or bin with high sides, so that you can stack the weed vertically as you weigh it.
For one, that keeps the weed you’re trying to measure accurately directly above the scale, ensuring it registers. Second, cannabis flower is not very dense. A pound or two of fresh flower would easily fill a one-gallon container.
And that’s another reason why higher quality scales with better load cells are a must. It’s not just the weed you are measuring, but the container itself, which can often weigh more than the weed you’re trying to measure.
So it’s critical to ensure you accurately and consistently “tare” your scale. Taring a scale means “zeroing” it out. Basically, the scale does the math for you, subtracting the weight of the container on top of it from the weed therein.
You can even take the container off the scale. You’ll notice the display reads a negative amount, with a “minus” sign in front of the weight, indicating how heavy your container is. If you don’t use a large sturdy container, get used to dumping your stash all over the table.
Can You Measure Weed By Eye?
If you’ve spent some time measuring weed, it’s natural that you’d have a sense of how much an ounce or pound of cannabis is by sight and it is tough to measure how many ounces in a pound. But there are a few challenges awaiting anyone trying to measure ounces or pounds by eye.
In the first place, cannabis flowers can vary significantly by density. This means that an ounce of stocky dense indica buds could take up half the space of an ounce of wispy sativa. Additionally, the water content of strains can vary widely. So it’s best to avoid measuring large quantities of weed without some kind of scale.
Final Hit: How Many Ounces In A Pound?
Now you know how to convert ounces of weed to pounds and, importantly, converting to grams. That last conversion will be crucial for using a good digital scale to accurately measure your weed.
So just remember, a pound of cannabis is about 450 grams. An oz, roughly 28 grams, so know you know how many grams in an ounce as well.
You might be able to measure quantities that high on your pocket digital scale. But the scale platform isn’t big enough for an accurate measurement. Get a good scale with a high-walled container, and you’ll be set!
