wiring a load cell

Most industrial load cells use a full Wheatstone bridge with strain gauges, which means you’ll typically see four or six wires coming out of the sensor. Four‑wire models combine the sense and excitation lines, while six‑wire cells keep them separate to compensate for lead resistance over long cable runs. Standard color codes aren’t universal, but many manufacturers follow conventions like red for excitation+, black for excitation‑, green for signal+, and white for signal‑. Always check the data sheet that came with your sensor—assuming one color pattern can cause embarrassing calibration shifts. If the sheet is missing, Kingmach support can often identify the wiring from the model number. Shielded cable is another detail that gets skipped: the shield drain wire should be connected only at the instrumentation end, never at both ends, to avoid ground loops. On the junction box side, keep connections clean and dry; moisture ingress is a common source of erratic readings. When hooking up to an amplifier or PLC, make sure the excitation voltage matches—many load cells run on 5 V to 10 V DC, and exceeding that can permanently damage the gauges. If you have a six‑wire cell but a four‑wire indicator, you’ll need to jumper sense+ to excitation+ and sense‑ to excitation‑ at the terminal block. It’s a small step that’s easy to miss and hard to diagnose later.