Haywire Thermoworks Probes


 
T

Tony L-Iowa

TVWBB Fan
Is it time to resolder my HM? Outside temp is 27 degrees. HM was brought from indoors, hooked up and started for my chicken smoke. I started on A/C power, then switched to DC at the first probe change from 1-2. Then, I added another Thermoworks probe to see things. The two probes behaved with similar behavior on the readouts. Only the Thermocouple appears to be behaving good at the moment. This probe issue has been a problem for me for some time now. I guess my next option is going to be reflow all joints and clean my circuit board of flux.

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This is strange. My smoker just had a belch. This caused the power output to go to zero and then everything fixed itself with the probes:

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May have spoke too soon... It spiked up again:

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Last One... Hopefully now stabilized...

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Do you have the same issues when the HM is running inside? Sub freezing temps play hell with electronics... Maybe the metal contacts on your HM probe jacks got some condensation on them and then froze or something like that? Or a solder joint is marginal and expanded due to the extreme cold? Cold temps are tough, but going from warm to cold is even tougher...
 
Ok, well, tonight I took apart my HM and resoldered all of the joints and cleaned it up with acetone afterwards (which I didn't do the first time). I don't have this problem indoors with the HM but I also don't smoke indoors so it's not a good comparison. I have for the longest time had occasional noise issues and some other problems that I thought were related to my outdoor GFCI power and/or HM power supply. But after using battery power today and still seeing this crazy probe behavior I had enough and decided to resolder. I'll try to report back after a few more smoke sessions this winter. Sure hope this resoldering does the trick.
 
A reflow of solder is always a good idea in this kinda scenario. As for smoking inside, I run my HM through the CAT5 cable (servo, blower and 3 probes) so my HM stays inside while the grill remains outside (with ~50ft of CAT5 cable between them), this eliminates the weather related problems for me. Cold, rain and snow play hell on electronics, someone posted recently about their wifi freezing up, literally, as they noted the Edimax has a low end temp limit around freezing and their wifi kept locking up because the outdoor temp was around 25F... So probes aside, outdoor cooking in winter could be a problem for those of us in colder climates, that's why I moved to the CAT5 solution.
 
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