Disabling Your Thermapen’s Auto-Off

Leonardo DaVinci, the famed Italian draftsman, painter, sculptor, inventor, architect and engineer is credited with the phrase, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If that is so, then DaVinci would have loved the ThermoWorks Thermapen^®.

Sleek lines and a bold display are all that can be seen on the Thermapen. One could search in vain for even that most ubiquitous of all features on modern electronics, the power button.

There is no on/off switch on the Thermapen: just open its switch-blade-style probe and it turns on, close the probe into its snug foldaway housing and the unit turns off. Form really does follow function. With the Thermapen, all you get is a 5” professional micro-thermocouple probe with a reduced tip and an oversized digital display that will show you the temperature at the tip of that probe to within a single degree Fahrenheit within 3 seconds or less wherever you choose to put it. Nothing to distract you.

A quiet “auto-off” feature is bundled into the circuitry in case you forget to close that probe and turn the unit off after use. Each time you open the probe, a silent timer begins its steady countdown and ten minutes later without fail, the Thermapen gently puts itself to sleep.

This is all well and good, but there are times when you need your Thermapen to stay awake and on the job for longer than 10 minutes at a stretch. It can be very frustrating when you’ve been monitoring the progress of, say, a custard or a roast in real time (which you can do with the Thermapen) only to have the unit go dark precisely as your nearing the moment of perfection.

There’s nothing to it but to pull the Thermapen out of the game, quickly close it and reopen it to get it started again and get back to work, right?

Actually, there is another way…

That’s right, you can disable the auto-off feature on your Thermapen for those times when you’ll be using it for more extended periods of time. Truth be told, some of us leave the auto-off feature disabled all the time. The reasoning goes like this: You’ll never finish your work in the kitchen without getting back to that Thermapen and cleaning off its probe and folding it and putting it away and the Thermapen’s mammoth 1,500-hour battery life is MORE than adequate to give you years and years of use before replacing the batteries (comparable units from other companies have 10-hours of battery life, that’s right one-one-hundred-and-fiftieth the battery power!).

To disable the auto-off feature on your Thermapen:

1. Turn the Thermapen off by folding the probe away and locking it into the probe retaining slot.
2. Using a coin with the appropriate thickness (a US quarter works great), carefully open the battery compartment and lift the cover out of the slot.
3. Using the tip of an opened paper clip, move the switch marked “3” to the “on” position–away from the batteries.
4. Close the battery cover.