The article presents low-cost experiments that enable to measure or at least estimate the values of charged straws, plastic rods or similar objects. First type of these measurements uses the Coulomb's law.
Several possibilities how to calculate the charge that can be used either at high school or at university level are presented. The second method uses a capacitor and a cheap multimeter.
It may elucidate the principle of charge meters provided for schools e.g. by Vernier and other companies. The series of experiments and calculations presented here can be regarded as an example of "multilayered simple experiments" approach presented at GIREP 2009 [1].