How to Choose a Hand Sealing Machine

Question 1 - what is the bag made of?

This decides whether any machine will work at all, so it comes first.

Polythene in its ordinary forms seals easily on any bench machine. Polypropylene seals with a slightly different setting. Most food laminates are made with a sealant inner layer so they will close on machines like these - but not all of them, and heavier or foil-bearing laminates often need sustained heat rather than a pulse.

Paper, foil without a sealant layer and plain woven sacks do not heat seal at all. If that is what you are packing, the answer is a different kind of machine entirely and we will say so.

The reliable move is to send a sample. Two pouches that look identical can behave completely differently, because what matters is a layer you cannot see.

Question 2 - how wide is the widest bag?

Lay the bag flat on the table, empty, and measure straight across the mouth from fold to fold. That measurement - not the bag's printed size and not its capacity - is what has to fit inside the seal bar.

Buy a seal bar longer than that, with a little margin so the operator is not aligning precisely on every press.

The mistake to avoid is buying for the average bag. The wide ones then have to be sealed in two overlapping passes, and the overlap is where they leak.

Question 3 - how many a day, at your busiest?

Use the peak, not the average. Season and festival peaks are when a machine is discovered to be too slow, and that is the worst time to find out.

Dozens a day is bench-machine work. Hundreds through a full shift is table top duty. Bags queuing for the machine is band sealer territory, and no amount of build quality in a bench machine changes that.

Question 4 - can the operator hold the bag with one hand?

This is the question that is almost never asked and most often decides whether a machine gets used.

If the bag is full, heavy, floppy or wide, both hands are needed to hold the mouth flat and square. A hand-pressed bar then means the bag is released at exactly the moment it must not be, and the result is a wrinkled seal, which is an open seal.

In that situation a foot-operated machine is not an upgrade, it is the correct format.

Question 5 - and only now, which machine?

With the first four answered, the machine follows almost mechanically, and any supplier can be asked the same question and compared fairly.

There is one more thing to ask before you commit, and it is the one buyers skip: what do the heating element and the PTFE strip cost, and will they still be available in a year? Those two parts are consumed by ordinary use. A cheap machine whose element you cannot buy is not cheap.

Ask us that as well. We will tell you which models we hold parts for.

What to send us

Bag width measured flat, what the bag is made of - a photograph or a posted sample if it is a laminate - your daily count at the peak, and whether the operator can hold the bag with one hand.

You will get back a machine, a seal length and a price against those, and if the cheaper machine is the right answer we will say so.