In the first part of this series I’ve covered why we needed a laser meter, what we thought we needed in a laser meter and what we ended up needing and using. Two laser meters were covered (Bosch GLM 50C, ADA Cosmos 150). The pros and cons for each laser meter were discussed in details, and the ADA was the winning tool. Finally, I’ve covered that we were planning to get another laser meter as the ADA has positively affected our workflow.
For our second laser meter we had the experience, so we thought we need a laser meter that has:
- Easy access to most of its features.
- Long battery life.
- Pythagoras, AKA indirect measurements.
- Two points height measurements, AKA indirect height measurements.
- Point to Point (P2P) measurements, which allows you to measure the distance between two points directly, no referencing, no indirect measurements, two button presses ( or so we thought ).
Our Journey with the Mileseey P7
After doing our research the meter that met these requirements was the Mileseey P7, it was sleek, with a rechargeable battery, all of the features above and was reasonably priced, the 150 m variant was round $180 at the time of purchasing it (2018). We’ve ordered the mater -laser meter are prohibited here- and we had to wait for 3 month for it to arrive and finally it arrived.
The meter came factory calibrated, we’ve compared it to the ADA and it was a couple of mm off and for our application that was fair enough. We’ve used it for 3 weeks and we were extremely happy with it, it was very simple to use, every feature was there front and center, each function has its own easy to reach tile, a touch screen that makes selecting functions a breath, and the P2P feature was a god send. The only drawback we’ve found was that sometimes the meter throws obviously wrong measurements – try measuring a 6 m distance and get 189 m.
The Shock
Then we’ve started the revision phase for these measurements that we’ve taken with the Mileseey P7 and we were shocked by huge errors (we’re talking meters not mm). We’ve found that the meter can’t measure in direct sunlight and instead of throwing an error it just throws a wrong measurements. The P2P measurements were way off. large distances i.e 80 m + is a no no, as it’ll throw wrong measurements and not an error.
After discovering that we’ve contacted Mileseey and asked them about a way to calibrate the meter to use it, they told us that calibration could only be done at the factory and we’ve to send it to back to them.
Before sending it back to Mileseey we’ve decided to test with another Mileseey P7 that we had access to and it was suffering from the same problems so we’ve guessed that there’s a problem with this model or brand and decided to skip sending the meter back to the manufacturer.
So the pros and cons of the Mileseey P7 are:
Pros of Mileseey P7
- Great battery life.
- Very easy to use with easy access to all functions.
- Touch screen.
Cons of Mileseey P7
- Not accurate.
- Low contrast screen which won’t be visible in sunlight.
Bottom Line: I’d recommend skipping the Mileseey P7 if you’re a professional who would use it to do real outdoor work.
After our experience with the Mileseey (not good at all) we still needed a second laser meter, this time we’ve decided to go for a brand name with all of the features we needed. This will be covered in the coming part of this series.