New Alarm Option for Time Of Day?


 

Tony L-Iowa

TVWBB Fan
When I cook Ribs I like to go 5 hours. I can probably write a cron job script to do what I want but I'm curious if it would make better sense to enhance the "alarms" page with another alarm that allows a setpoint to change when a "wall clock" time has been been exceeded?

On my ribs I don't use probes and I simply smoke on a "time" profile. In the event I'm paying attention I'd like to have my smoker fall back to a holding temperature of 140 degrees after my programmed time has expired.
 
Seems this would be best added to the "Ramp and Hold" function, where instead of selecting a probe to trigger the ramp/hold you could select the clock and enter a time...
 
If it were just a time based alarm that said "at 18:00 change setpoint to 140F" that would probably be a fail, because I think most pits would put the fire out trying to change abruptly from 225/250F to 140F. It seems like a logical extension of the ramp/hold function, however, the current scheme tracks the food temp and ramps down the pit temp according to what is happening with the food temp. I've seen it ramp the pit up & down which surprised me.
With the timed ramp there is no feedback, so the HM would have to ramp at a constant rate or in a selectable time period perhaps?
 
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I have an electric smoker that is well insulated so maybe I don't fall in the category of "most pits would put the fire out". But I actually desire the abrupt setting (hence my "new alarm for TOD" quote). Maybe both options we're talking about could be achieved. One as the alarm and the other as the down-ramp/hold function that you are mentioning.
 
Yah, if you have an electric smoker that's not as common, most people are burning coals...
It would seem to me there should be a way to do what you want with a script? There seems to be a section on the script page above the probe high/low entries, not sure if scripts in that section run without a trigger from a probe?
If the timed ramp/hold were added and you could select a target hold temp and the amount of time to get there (so a charcoal fire can be brought down gradually and not snuffed out) you would just select a very short time for the ramp function to make it an abrupt change like you are after...
 

 

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