I recently bought a Taylor, single probe digital. I brought it home and gave it the boiling water test. I put a pan of water on the stove. I dropped in two separate dial meat thermometers that I had used for standard oven and rotisserie cooking. I also put the Taylor probe in the water. At tap temperature the two dial thermos read the same and the Taylor was a couple of degrees low. I turned on the stove and the water started to warm. The dial thermos continued to run close to each other, never getting more than one or two degrees above or below each other. The Taylor continued to be outside their range. Initially a couple of degrees low but it got increasingly lower as the temp climbed. When the water started to boil the dial thermos said 210-213F. The Taylor said 201F. I let the boil get as high and rapid as possible. The dials stayed in their range, between 210 and 215F. After several minutes the Taylor finally climbed to 205F, but bobbled between 204-205, back and forth.
I called the Taylor factory and talked to a customer service person. They looked up my model. There was a temperature deviation chart that went along with it. At lower temps the established(read that acceptable to them) variance was a couple of degrees As you went higher, say 100F it was 3-4 degrees, at 150F it was 5-6 degrees etc. Finally at over 200F it was plus or minus 11 degrees.
So, by their own estimation the best this thermometer would do is give me plus or minus 11 degrees. That is a possibility of 22 degrees. Unfortunately, that was totally acceptable to them. In fact, to keep the cost down, that is all the closer the engineers designed this model. Kind of hard to get your Brisket or your ribs right with as much as 22 degrees variance.
I let Taylor know how disappointed I was. They offered to send me a new one, but said mine was working within established and acceptable norms and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. They went on to say that if they did send another, it would perform to those same acceptable(to them), variances. They went on to say that all of their thermometers had variance charts like this. It is just that the more expensive, the lower the variances.
Question: Have any of you done this similar test to the Maverick ET-73? If so, how did yours hold up to the boiling water test?
I need to switch from this Taylor and move to something more accurate. Many of you seem to really like this model of Maverick. I just don't want to buy another mistake. Thanks for your input.
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