About the postage meter base

The base is essentially an envelope handler, designed to transport your mail through the meter. Unlike the meter itself, bases can be purchased outright – but they are often leased along with the meter. Prices for bases start at several hundred dollars, but advanced options can push the price into the thousands of dollars. Although it may sound expensive, it can be more cost-effective than paying a monthly rental fee.

The four main parts of a base include the feeder, sealer, stacker, and tape dispenser.

Feeder

A feeder guides envelopes through the meter and affixes the correct postage based on the current postage rates. Although you can get a low-end meter without a feeder, feeding a large mailing by hand is quite tedious.

You have the choice of a semiautomatic feeder, which lets you feed in a handful of envelopes at a time, or an automatic feeder where no manual feeding is needed. Automatic systems are quite expensive, starting around $1,200 more than similar semiautomatic systems, which cost about $700, but can speed the process immensely for very high-volume mailers.

Feeders are rated by their feeding speed. A slow machine will process 15 letters per minute, while the fastest operate at about 270 letters per minute.

Sealer

A sealer moistens the envelope flap and closes it. On the less expensive systems, the sealer is more of a moistener than an actual "sealer."

Unfortunately, the sealer tends to be the most unreliable component of a postage meter system. Because of the presence of glue and water, sealers often gum up and require regular cleaning.

Stacker

After mail is metered, it must be cleared from the machine. This requires a stacker. Low-end stackers are no more than a catch tray placed at the edge of the meter and designed to hold metered pieces of mail.

Power stackers can stack more envelopes by using a conveyor mechanism to move the stamped pieces away from the meter's edge. These power stackers can add $1,000 to $2,000 to the cost of a mailing system, and can be added to only the fastest systems.

Tape dispenser

When sending larger packages or odd-shaped mail, it is not always possible to print the indicia directly onto the mailing piece. In these cases, strips of adhesive paper, called tape, are fed through the meter and affixed to the package.

Unless it is carefully fed, the meter may miss the strip entirely and waste postage. If you will be using tape often, it is worth getting a base that has a tape dispenser.

Tape dispensers are available in two varieties: pre-cut dispensers that use single pieces of tape and dispensers that use a roll of tape. Bases equipped to use roll tape usually cost significantly more than bases using pre-cut tape, but can result in lower operating costs over time.