My lid thermometer works....can this be right?

[Ryan Taylor]

Just got a 22.5 WSM and did my first smoke on it. I put an oven thermometer on the top grate and throughout my first cook, every time I lifted the lid and checked, the two thermometers were within 10 degrees of the grate. Everyone knows that factory grill/smoker thermometers are more for decoration than anything so can this actually be right? Is it more likely that my crappy little oven thermometer is also wrong or do people with WSM typically find that their dome thermometers are accurate? The only real discrepancy I ran into was while it was heating up they were wildly off but after about 200, they started to be pretty comparable.

 

[Dwain Pannell]

I've noticed that early in the cook, my dome therm and ET-73 (mounted to the grate) are pretty close. However, as the cook progresses, the dome temp seems to increase though the ET-73 remains steady. I imagine it is hotter in the dome so not sure if the therm is accurate or not and quite frankly, I've never checked it.

 

[Bob Mann]

I've found the stock WSM lid thermometer to be accurate.
In my WSMs, the lid thermometer reads about 50F lower than the grate temperature.
Temperatures are just different in different parts of the cooker.

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[B Frosolone]

I recently starting using a DigiQ and the lid thermometer has been about 50 degrees higher than the DigiQ temp probe.

 

[Doug Wade]

I cooked off the dome temp for probably the first year I had the WSM. At some point I got a control unit and started to use grate temperatures and that took a little adjustment. I did notice that once the unit's really been stable for a bit the temperatures start to converge unless it's really cold outside.

But then they started getting further and further off... and I got curious and put my lid thermometer in boiling water and it read 202. It's about three years old, not sure why it got off at this point.

All that being said if I had to cook off the lid thermometer I could. People get way, way, too concerned about temperatures. It could be off by 25 degrees, who cares as long as it's consistent. You'll instinctively learn to correct for it eventually.

 

[Marty W]

Well said Doug and Bob. As long as it repeatable you can work with it and a lot of people think they should match but you are taking temps at two different locations of the cooking chamber.