Impulse Sealer Size Guide – 8 to 24 Inch

Free online size selector

Give the selector three things: the flat width of your widest bag, the material it is made from and your daily count. It suggests the PackForge size and version to buy – and says plainly if an impulse sealer is not the machine for you.

Impulse sealer size chart – 8 to 24 inch

How to measure your bag

1. Take the widest bag you seal, not the average one.
2. Lay it flat on a table with the mouth facing you.
3. Measure straight across the mouth, edge to edge, in mm (1 inch = 25.4 mm).
4. Add 10 mm for a clean margin. The seal bar must be at least that long.
5. If the bag is foil or metallised inside, stop – you need a hot bar sealer.

Question 1 - what is the bag made of?

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

Everyday polythene closes without trouble on any bench sealer, and polypropylene just needs a slightly different setting. Most food laminates carry an inner sealant layer, which is what lets a bench sealer close them - yet some do not, and the heavier laminates or those containing foil frequently need steady heat instead of 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.

Sending a sample is the only safe course. Two pouches can look exactly alike and still seal in very different ways, since the deciding layer is hidden inside the film.

Question 2 - how wide is the widest bag?

Put the empty bag down flat and run a tape across the mouth, from one folded edge to the other. The seal bar has to cover that figure; the size printed on the bag and the weight it holds tell you nothing here.

Choose a bar that is longer than this by a small margin, so whoever runs the machine does not have to line each bag up exactly.

Do not size the machine for your typical bag. Every wider bag would then need two seals that overlap, and that overlap is exactly where air and product escape.

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. With a bar pressed by hand, the operator lets go of the bag at the very moment it needs holding, the film creases, and a creased seal does not keep the bag closed.

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.

Put that question to us too, and we will name the models whose parts we keep.

What to send us

The flat width of the bag, its material (with a photo, or a sample in the post if it is laminated), how many you pack on your busiest day, and whether one hand is enough to hold it.

Our reply names a machine, a seal length and a price based on those details, and tells you openly when the lower-priced model is the better choice.