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Number of Probes Supported
The Display can support up to 4 probes simultaneously. The App will eventually be able to
support even more probes.
Power
The Display is powered by an internal battery good for 1 week of active use, 6-8 weeks standby. The
internal battery can be recharged with a USB-C cable and takes about 90 minutes.
The probes are powered by small internal batteries that are good for 7 hours in instant-read mode and 30 hours in normal cooking mode. The probes are recharged using the charger and will fully charge in about 20 minutes.
Bluetooth Performance
Combustion, Inc. is making a pretty big deal of the improvements that they have made to Bluetooth®
connectivity and range. Anyone who follows discussions of MEATER and MeatStick probes knows that some
people have a lot of trouble with dropping connections while others do not. So a probe that
does manage to achieve higher connection rates and longer ranges would be very welcome.
Our experience shows that Combustion has indeed improved the performance over typical truly wireless meat probes by employing BLE5 (Bluetooth Low Energy, version 5) which allows a Bluetooth® device to broadcast its data without having to connect or pair with another device. As a result the Combustion probe and Display connect almost instantly. There's no pairing required. It's just plain simple and powerful. So, let's see how the Combusion, Inc. Predictive Thermometer does in some common kitchen scenarios.
Trivection Ovens: Combustion, Inc. says that these probes won't work in trivection ovens. What's a trivection oven? It's a combination oven, convection oven and microwave oven. We beg to differ. We found that the Display is able to connect to a probe from 10 feet away. Pretty impressive. The best we have ever seen with other probes is about 3 feet.Microwave Oven: We hope it is obvious that you cannot use these probes in microwave ovens while the oven is operating lest you inflict severe damage to the probe. However, we thought we'd see what happens when we placed a probe in our microwave oven. 22 feet.
Conventional Ovens: If your conventional oven has a glass window in the door, you should be able to get pretty good range with these probes. We were able to connect up to 33 feet and probably considerably further as that was as far from the oven as we could get without going outside.
Aluminum Foil: We wrapped the probe in heavy duty aluminum foil such that it wasn't touching the foil, and tightly sealed the pouch. We could connect at 38 feet.
Dutch Ovens: The dutch oven we used was a #8 Griswold dutch oven with its patented "Tite-Top" lid. Surely, this is going to stop us from connecting? Nope. 25 feet.
If the Combustion probe's signal can fight its way out of a cast iron dutch oven, a ceramic kamado-style cooker should be easy-peasy. So next we went outside to see how the probe fared with a few different types of outdoor cookers.
Medium Big Green Egg: We placed the probe upright on the cooking grate and then marched off how far the Display could connect. Approximately 175 feet, line of sight.Weber Smokey Joe: Here we closed up the air vents, put the lid on and again marched off the distance. The Display was able to connect from 50 feet, again line of sight.
Ooni Karu Pizza Oven: Ok, it's a little bizarre, but it was just sitting there begging to be part of the fun. We had the fire lid on, the front door on and the chimney hole had the plug in. So the only egress for Bluetooth® signal was out the back. The furthest we could get from the oven without leaving the deck was 40 feet, and the Display had no problem connecting.
Of course, the more realistic question is whether or not you can stay connected while going inside your house or around the corner of your house. From this test, we produced the following diagram which shows the floorplan of our house and deck, and the location of the cooker. For reference, the distance from the front of the house to the back of the deck is about 70 feet. Here's how the Combustion probe did:
As you can see, we were able to connect to the probe in almost the entire house. Up on the second floor, the results were about the same. And this was just with the probe. This performance matches or exceeds what we have observed with other probes using their Bluetooth® repeaters! In order to see what kind of range we could get with the Display repeating the probe's signal to the App on our phone, we placed the probe inside our large Big Green Egg Cooker andthe Display/repeater inside our house. We then checked the connection with the App on our phone. We could connect virtually anywhere inside the house and outside.
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