Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Digital thermometers are mostly a perfected technology by now. There's less than $10 worth of parts in these regardless of how much they are selling them for. You can buy a $5 multimeter with a type K thermocouple probe and it will have the same accuracy as any other, since it's intrinsic to the material itself. Hence the propaganda campaigns by companies who stand the most to lose from it.

...and downvoted for speaking the truth. Yes, it's all marketing BS, a tiny "bead" type thermocouple probe has next to no thermal mass and reads as instantly as you'll ever need for cooking purposes. Go buy a cheap one yourself if you don't believe me.

View on HN

Did you not read the other replies? Many people's experience is that the difference is in the speed of reading, not the accuracy. This is borne out by buying many cheaper thermometers.

Regardless, I don't think the self-righteousness is called for. "Downvoted for speaking the truth"? We're talking about thermometers.

No doubt there are cheap ones that are utter crap; what I'm saying is that a fast settling and accurate thermometer is not some ultra-difficult thing that only a single company can make for a ridiculous price.

Can you recommend a competing thermometer of similar quality, speed, and accuracy?

Yet no one else makes them.

Is "speed of reading" a function of the probe, or the silicon?

Agreed. Hence the shock on people paying the markup. It’s not like this comes with some costly certification. There’s likely 1000s of products that offer the exact same capabilities at a 1/10 the price.

If you can find the cheapest ones that are just as durable, accurate, and fast you can replace the market leader amongst pros and serious hobbyists. That's worth a lot of money.

Get the right influencer/review site on your side and it's all downhill from there.

ETA: the thermapen isn't the Wirecutter recommendation. They recommend the entry level, $35 thermoworks option. So that's the price point to compete with and the $100 thermapen is the quality mark to hit.

The thermoworks dot option is also manufactured and sold by ETI in the UK. Thermoworks just slapped a different name in it.

It sounds like you're just making a seemingly reasonable assumption about something you don't know a lot about. There actually are not a lot of different kinds of good quality fast-reading thermometers out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com