Why Professionals Don’t use Wireless Ambient Sensors

So, you just spent over $100 on a fancy new wireless probe, and the ambient sensor on the end of it is reading 50°F lower than you expected. Well, you’re not alone, and it’ll keep happening if you don’t change how you measure your ambient temperature. We’ll explain why that happens and how you can find the ambient temperature in your oven or smoker accurately.

Monitoring Ambient Temperature is Critical

One of the most important factors in making good food is temperature, even ambient temperature. Cooking with the right air temperature can be the difference between a juicy piece of meat that you’re proud to share with others and a crispy, dry lump that you’d rather use as a door stop.

To make sure you’re getting the right temperature, you have to have a good thermometer that you can trust. Even if your wireless thermometer is reading accurately inside your meat, it doesn’t mean the ambient sensor is reading the true air temperature. This is because of a couple of factors: the heat sink effect and evaporative cooling. Let’s break these two phenomena down.

Heat Sink

When you put your hand on a table, it’s cold. After a minute, you’ll feel that the table has gotten warmer and your hand is slightly cooler. They are trying to equilibrate and become the same temperature. Essentially, the table was a heat sink for your hand. When you have a probe in a cold piece of meat inside a hot smoker, the meat has become a heat sink. It’s sucking the heat from the probe (and it’s ambient sensor), altering the final result your probe is reading.

Evaporative Cooling

The heat sink effect is only part of the problem! We can’t forget about evaporative cooling. Because there’s water in meat, it will evaporate as it gets hot. This will create a cooler layer around the meat that will also affect the reading of your wireless ambient sensor.

These two events compound with each other and give you a wildly inaccurate result when trying to find the true air temperature.

Why Precision Matters

It’s a fact that great thermometers make life better. At ThermoWorks, we don’t want to give you an “okay” thermometer to put your trust in and then end up ruining your food. Because of this, we can’t put an ambient sensor at the end of our wireless probe (RFX MEAT). The technology to give you top-tier results doesn’t exist yet.

Take a look at this ambient temperature test The Barbecue Lab did with 9 different wireless probes.

RFX GATEWAY, using the wired Pro-Series High Temp Air Probe, performed the best in this comparison test. It especially shone through in the first 6 hours of the cook, where all the competition fell prey to the heat sink effect and evaporative cooling.

3 Simple Tips for Success

Try these steps if you want the most accurate and reliable ambient temperature results:

• Use a wired ambient air probe like the Pro-Series High Temp Air Probe (included in the RFX Kit).
• Place the air probe approximately 1 inch away from the meat with its grate clip. This will show the temperature your meat is experiencing instead of a dome thermometer at the top, or an oven thermometer, which is typically located at the back. This placement will also avoid being affected by the evaporative cooling.

• If you’re managing a fire in your smoker, you can control your heat with Billows, which connects to your RFX GATEWAY. (Optional: Billows® 12V Battery Bank)

FAQ’s

The Bottom Line on a Wireless Ambient Sensor

Enough of the worry, doubt, and frustration. To ensure an accurate air temperature reading, stop relying on the wireless ambient sensors and go with a wired probe. You want to be the hero at the cookout, not the villain; don’t poison your guests with a dry piece of meat. Maintaining the right air temperature can make or break a good meal.