Every once in a while you come across a device that is awesome, yet suffers from a fundamental flaw….that isn’t exactly the device's fault. Such is the Weber iGrill2 for me.
I’ve used this now for several cooks. It’s well built. It has a handy magnet on the back and the display is bright red and easily readable. The probes are repeatedly consistent with one another and appear to be quite accurate. The iPhone app is intuitive and very easy to set cooking temperatures, alarms, and monitor them in single temp/multiple temp and single graph/multiple graph views.
Its flaw is – wait for it – its Bluetooth. Now, if you are someone who stays outdoors the entire time, this might not be a problem, but even line-of-sight to my grill through a window 25 feet away, my iPhone SE loses connection with the iGrill.
The other issue is that it is really only a phone app. (The display on the iGrill 2 itself only illuminates when you are next to it.) My phone goes to sleep every few minutes. I’m actually cooking a slab of ribs right now and it is an enormous pain to keep waking the phone up to see what is going on. (Yes, I can set it to never go to sleep….but then I have to keep toggling that on and off.)
A large part of me really can’t blame the iGrill for this. (Incidentally, the iGrill 2 seems to be manufactured by a company called iDevices and is just rebranded by Weber.) I’m an IT professional and I know full well Bluetooth was never designed for long-range RF communication. (The technical term is a PAN – Personal Area Network, meant for things 5-10 feet away.)
Maybe if my house was not made of brick or the iPhone SE had a better Bluetooth antenna/transceiver, perhaps these problems wouldn’t exist for me, but they do.
I most definitely will be getting another remote monitoring digital grill monitor. (I got the iGrill as a gift.) Not all is lost, of course. Using the iGrill 2 over the last several cooks has shown me what features I really want and some I can live without. Moreover, I can easily repurpose it as an oven thermometer. Indeed, the first use of the thing was to verify that my oven is 25 degrees over what it is set at.
--Michael
I’ve used this now for several cooks. It’s well built. It has a handy magnet on the back and the display is bright red and easily readable. The probes are repeatedly consistent with one another and appear to be quite accurate. The iPhone app is intuitive and very easy to set cooking temperatures, alarms, and monitor them in single temp/multiple temp and single graph/multiple graph views.
Its flaw is – wait for it – its Bluetooth. Now, if you are someone who stays outdoors the entire time, this might not be a problem, but even line-of-sight to my grill through a window 25 feet away, my iPhone SE loses connection with the iGrill.
The other issue is that it is really only a phone app. (The display on the iGrill 2 itself only illuminates when you are next to it.) My phone goes to sleep every few minutes. I’m actually cooking a slab of ribs right now and it is an enormous pain to keep waking the phone up to see what is going on. (Yes, I can set it to never go to sleep….but then I have to keep toggling that on and off.)
A large part of me really can’t blame the iGrill for this. (Incidentally, the iGrill 2 seems to be manufactured by a company called iDevices and is just rebranded by Weber.) I’m an IT professional and I know full well Bluetooth was never designed for long-range RF communication. (The technical term is a PAN – Personal Area Network, meant for things 5-10 feet away.)
Maybe if my house was not made of brick or the iPhone SE had a better Bluetooth antenna/transceiver, perhaps these problems wouldn’t exist for me, but they do.
I most definitely will be getting another remote monitoring digital grill monitor. (I got the iGrill as a gift.) Not all is lost, of course. Using the iGrill 2 over the last several cooks has shown me what features I really want and some I can live without. Moreover, I can easily repurpose it as an oven thermometer. Indeed, the first use of the thing was to verify that my oven is 25 degrees over what it is set at.
--Michael
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