Combustion Inc Wireless thermometer probe by Chris Young

[ChefChrisYoung]

Yes, the minimum 2 inch insertion depth is designed to protect the battery and sensitive electronics that are all stuffed up in the tip. They can safely operate to 100C/212F, so you can use it without inserting to that minimum as long as you keep the first 2 inches of the probe below 100C/212F.

 

One thing I'm excited about it using it as a quick instant read thermometer that automatically finds the lowest temperature neat the tip. In my experience it's pretty easy to not find the exact core with a conventional thermometer, and my digital signal processing and applied math colleagues have been doing a wonderful job building very good instant read algorithms that also interpolate between the first three sensors to find the the lowest temperature so that you won't miss the true core temperature as long as you're kind of close. 

[FlashJack]

Chris,

 

great to see you following matters here and you seem to be giving this plenty of deep thinking.

 

Good.

 

Meantime I have more and more products from Thermoworks and InkBird that don't quite do the job.

 

So, um, when?

Edited June 6, 2021 by FlashJack
typo (log)

[&roid]

Also cannot wait for this, looks a great product. 
 

chris, any thoughts about using it to control a fan blower for kamado Cooker?

[whenric]

Hey all,

 

Chris Young's new wireless thermometer is going to go on sale SOON!  I'm pretty excited about it, and so should you be!

 

Previous posts are here.  Basically with many temp sensors, they can estimate speed of cooking, when items will be done, etc.  It looks pretty sweet.  

 

I'm signed up to pre-order,; they're currently offering 30% off.  Here's the link.  It seems like it will allow me to do sous-vide level cooking in the oven, on the range, etc.  I already do this a lot anyways, as I like the better crust production that I get from low temp in oven.  I have been doing my roast chicken in the oven this way for a long time (using this technique), and am excited to have this probe for that purpose.  I even suspect that you can seal it inside a sous-vide bag to do 'delta cooking' to get faster results via true sous vide.  We'll see!

 

Anyways, I'm excited for this to come out, and I hope others are too!

[whenric]

Also, here's a video of it in action.  Sucker is being immersed in deep fry oil and liquid nitrogen, so seems pretty robust.

 

 

[yimyammer]

anyone looking to buy this?

 

 

 

 

 

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff,  so I think I'll be a buyer

[gfweb]

what's it do?

[Alex]

Looks like a Kickstarter w/o Kickstarter.

 

BTW, we use that Quikset smart key for our front door.

[btbyrd]

The real thread is here. I don't know why someone felt compelled to make that second thread. Anyway, it's not a Kickstarter without a Kickstarter. I don't even know what that would mean.

 

Anyway, I'm hoping to buy one if the price is right. I have a few applications (like cooking inside a donabe) where using traditional probes doesn't work well. Other wireless probes are much larger than this one (though it's not small) and don't offer nearly as many features as this one does. And I trust Chris Young to make an awesome product.

 

Host's note: three related topics have been merged, and the host (that would be me) forgot to leave a link so indicating. As a result, the first two sentences in this post won't make sense! Sorry!

Edited January 19, 2022 by Smithy
Added host's note (log)

[yimyammer]

20 hours ago, Alex said:

Looks like a Kickstarter w/o Kickstarter.

 

BTW, we use that Quikset smart key for our front door.

 

ha, not sure why that image got included but if mods cant delete it, please ignore.  I use these on my rental properties and guess I accidentally pasted the screen shot from an order I was making

 

Sorry for the duplicate thread, I thought I searched thoroughly before posting but obviously I failed

Edited January 20, 2022 by yimyammer (log)

[yimyammer]

18 hours ago, gfweb said:

what's it do?

more accurate temperature readings due to multiple places on the probe taking temps.  I think it also predicts when the food will be ready based on temps per protein type

[Greg Jones]

20 hours ago, yimyammer said:

I think it also predicts when the food will be ready based on temps per protein type.

It will be interesting to see if the multiple sensors make this a useful feature. The MEATER also has predictive done times, and it is worthless. You could throw darts at random times posted on a wall and have just as much a chance that it is accurate. 

[andrewk512]

The product seems really cool and I trust it will be produced great, but I don't really see a use case for the home cook.

 

When I want precision I go to the APO or sous vide. I could see it being used for barbecue but I think most people find the charm of barbecue being the low tech nature of it (otherwise why not get a barbecue with a temp regulator). I see the liquid nitro and oil immersion being more for R&D related uses, at least from my point of view

[btbyrd]

I don't see it that way at all. Wireless probes are potentially useful to anyone who cares about temperature. It's not about replicating sous vide or a combi oven.... it's being able to check temps at a glance without having to physically go to your grill or oven or whatever. Being able to check the temp of a pork shoulder (or whatever) outside while cooking inside is obviously valuable. There are numerous other scenarios where a wireless probe is useful. Having multiple sensors embedded in the probe makes it very likely that predictive cooking will be accurate. A probe that can measure core temp, ambient temp, and four points in between is... well, I don't even know what it is. But it seems potentially very helpful. And though few people will ever use it with liquid nitrogen or to deep fry, the fact that the unit can withstand such extreme temperature environments is a testament to its build quality. I mean... I do have access to LN at home and I occasionally deep fry, and I doubt that I'd use the probe for either purpose. But I do have a bunch of use cases in mind where a probe like this would be quite useful. I didn't feel too attracted to the Meater probe or other similar probes because they were girthier and didn't have much advantage over and above ordinary probes. This seems much better. I just hope the price is right. 

[JoNorvelleWalker]

My wireless probes are from Thermoworks.  I'm not sure what this brings to the table.

 

[btbyrd]

Which probes are those @JoNorvelleWalker?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

3 hours ago, btbyrd said:

Which probes are those @JoNorvelleWalker?

 

ThermaQ WiFi

 

[andrewk512]

17 hours ago, btbyrd said:

I don't see it that way at all. Wireless probes are potentially useful to anyone who cares about temperature. It's not about replicating sous vide or a combi oven.... it's being able to check temps at a glance without having to physically go to your grill or oven or whatever. Being able to check the temp of a pork shoulder (or whatever) outside while cooking inside is obviously valuable. There are numerous other scenarios where a wireless probe is useful. Having multiple sensors embedded in the probe makes it very likely that predictive cooking will be accurate. A probe that can measure core temp, ambient temp, and four points in between is... well, I don't even know what it is. But it seems potentially very helpful. And though few people will ever use it with liquid nitrogen or to deep fry, the fact that the unit can withstand such extreme temperature environments is a testament to its build quality. I mean... I do have access to LN at home and I occasionally deep fry, and I doubt that I'd use the probe for either purpose. But I do have a bunch of use cases in mind where a probe like this would be quite useful. I didn't feel too attracted to the Meater probe or other similar probes because they were girthier and didn't have much advantage over and above ordinary probes. This seems much better. I just hope the price is right. 

 

Fair enough. I'm genuinely curious about the use cases. For instance, the donabe, what do you make in it that requires precise temperature monitoring? 

 

At home I generally only use an immersible thermometer for confections and roast chicken. For everything else I use an IR thermometer. I did just use a thermometer for a pork shoulder this week, although it was the one built into the APO. I could probably start doing my chickens in that. The barbecue I did last year was all temp controlled and had thermometers built into the machine. Maybe this thermometer fulfills a more all purpose use case for multiple devices when those devices don't already have built in tech

 

Not trying to be contrarian. I generally find myself trying to think of reasons to push myself to buy kitchen gadgets I might not need

[btbyrd]

4 hours ago, andrewk512 said:

 

Fair enough. I'm genuinely curious about the use cases. For instance, the donabe, what do you make in it that requires precise temperature monitoring? 

 

I have a donabe smoker that I like to use as a finishing step on sous vide pork (and occasionally beef short ribs). There are other delicate items I'd like to use in there as well. The problem is that once the the lid closes, you can't really open it to temp check things without letting the smoke out. Wired probes don't work either. I just have to guess, and there's a *lot* of trial and error - mostly error - in getting the times and temps right with the donabe smoker. 

 

A similar sort of scenario is cooking sous vide with a temperature delta. It's easy to seal a wireless probe in a bag with a piece of protein and monitor the core temp to make sure that it doesn't overshoot the desired final temp. Vac bags, like a donabe smoker, are kind of black boxes where you can't look inside without significant hassle. Sure, you can futz with hypodermic type K thermocouples and closed cell foam tape... but a wireless probe is much easier. And if it can accurately predict cookt times, all the better.

 

Apart from these scenarios, I do a fair amount of conventional cooking in grills and ovens, and being able to monitor the temperature of something that's cooking outside while I'm finishing up other items in the kitchen seems very valuable. Or being able to keep an eye on the roast in the oven while hosting my family in the living room during the holidays. Or whatever.

 

Right now I mostly rely on a Thermapen for temperature duties. I have a cheap wired probe for large roasts in the oven. They're both just fine, but I think this would be a nice upgrade -- at least if the price is right.

 

4 hours ago, andrewk512 said:

For everything else I use an IR thermometer.

 

I have an IR thermometer too, but they're useless for checking internal temps and they can be somewhat misleading depending on the thermal emissivity of the target. I find they're mostly useful for checking the temperature of cookware. Nice to have, but I'd much rather have a probe. 

[adey73]

199 bucks

[palo]

1 hour ago, adey73 said:

199 bucks

I stand by my earlier comment

 

p

[Raamo]

For sure over $100, guessing under $200..... $199 would be $139.3 with 30% off - and $129.30 with one referral seems to work out.

[btbyrd]

Even at $140 with the 30% discount, that may be a bit too rich for my blood. The main competition is probably the Meater, and the OG Meater probe and charger is $70. I know that this probe has 8 sensors as opposed to the Meater's 2, and the Combustion Inc. one comes with its own display (which doesn't seem especially expensive to build). And it's yellow. And I don't doubt that it will probably be a better product given who is behind the project. But that's still a lot of $$ for a single wireless probe.

 

@adey73 Where did you get the $199 figure from?

[FlashJack]

An email from Combustion send 25 Jan:

 

[btbyrd]

Thanks! That had somehow ended up in my spam folder. So it looks like the probe itself is $129 and the timer is $79 if you buy them individually, but the preorder will be for the bundle. $80 seems a lot for a timer, but I guess it has to do some computation to figure out the estimated "ready in" time. But $80 seems a lot for a timer. That price for the probe seems reasonable, especially if you could get 30% off of it. Meh. If the whole shebang was $129 and you could get a discount on that, I'd be all over it. But I think I'll have to sit this one out. Which is a shame because I wanted one and I doubt they'll be this cheap again.