****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I bought two of these. One for my higher end AGA Pro oven at home and one for a Jenn Air range at a weekend cabin. The Jenn Air is generally considered a good quality unit, but not on par with the AGA Pro. Having the hotloops in two in different ovens has provided me with a good insight into these units. After about a month of use in both ovens the units appear to be working well. That said, these are are cheap thermometers - not high end by any means - so I am sure there are some valid issues with people getting lemons, but personally I think that some of the negative reviews reflect more on the user's ovens or unrealistic user expectations than the thermometers themselves.Use:To install I tied the cable with a loose single overhand knot to the middle rack in both ovens so the sensor hangs in the air space about where the food cooks. In this application, the sensor reads the air temp inside the oven and not the temp of the surfaces inside the oven. The door closes easily over the thin but insulated wires and the unit is placed on the counter next to the stove. These have an on/off switch, but I have just left these on. They have been running for over a month using a single battery. There is one review about these not being suitable as oven thermometers because they don't show the running average. That is true, but the item description does not say the units have this feature and personally I would rather know the actual current temp at all times.Accuracy:Some reviews have said these are not accurate based on what they see from their oven or based on readings with an analog thermometer...both of which are notoriously inaccurate. I have tested these with a high quality digital instant read thermometer that maxes out at 375 degrees. They showed comparable readings (+/- 5 degrees) up to 350 degrees. I have also tested this with a infrared thermometer "gun". The IR thermometer reads the temp of the oven surface not the air in the oven so the readings are not exactly the same but are comparable up to 450, which is the highest I have tested. Based on my tests these seem more than adequate for home cooking and baking.Real world use:The AGA Pro is a great oven but just has an analog temp setting dial with no temp read out. Using a standard analog oven thermometer we notice it was about 20 degrees hotter than the dial setting. I purchased the hotloop unit so I can more accurately know the air temp of the oven for baking. In the AGA Pro, once the oven comes to temperature it basically stays rock solid. There is very little air temperature variation between thermostat cycles once the oven is solidly preheated and the door stays closed. The story very is different in the Jenn Air. The Jenn Air has digital controls that let you set specific temps and also a digital read out that purports to show the oven temp. In use, the hotloop unit shows the same temp as the Jenn Air readout as it preheats -usually within a degree or two - but once the preheat cycle is done the oven beeps and the oven readout shows that the oven stays at the set point. The hotloop readout fluctuates around, quite a bit. I originally thought that I had one bad unit, but I switched them out and both behave the same in the different ovens, so I am confident the issue is with the ovens, not the thermometers.Because I bake in both ovens, I suspected there were some issues with the Jenn Air that the hotloop unit helped confirm. As an example, this weekend I put the oven on 200 to keep something warm. Once preheated, the oven beeped and showed a it was 200 degrees, but the hotpoint kept rising to about 255 degrees. Later I was making a roast and I had it set to 400 degrees convection. As the oven preheated, the hotloop and oven readouts tracked the same. As the oven reached the setpoint it beeped and showed a temp of 400 as the hotloop went up to 415. When I put in the roast, the oven continued to show 400 while the hotloop showed temps decreased (the air temp drops sharply when the door is open). The oven elements kicked back on when the hotloop read 340 and then only ever went back up to 385, although the oven display showed all the while a it was 400 degrees. Some of this may be because the thermostat in the oven is inside the metal casing, but I think the computer controlled Jenn Air is programed to lie to you about the temperature to make it appear more stable than it really is. The hotloop unit has helped to mitigate this problem and improved my baking with this particular oven.Summary:These are good units for the price. Expectations should be tempered given these are very simple and cheaply made units, but they do a good job showing the instantaneous temperature of the air inside the oven and are more than adequate for baking.
