Resistor Tolerances - Avoiding Manufacturing Errors

1% resistors are often required in electronics applications, however, during manufacturing, sometimes manufactures will make a mistake by ordering a generic resistor that may be 5% or even 10% in order to save costs. A useful trick is to specify resistors that only come in 1% values. For example if you have a resistor divider that requires a ratio of 10, rather than using a 10K ohm resistor and a 100K ohm resistor, specify a 10.2K and a 102K ohm instead. This way there is no possible way to inadvertently order the higher tolerance resistors.