Grill surface thermometers are amazingly useful

[David C]

Until and unless you know everything about your smoker or grill, I think those small, inexpensive, grill thermometers are indispensable. Sure, I have meat probes and ambient probes, but every grill or smoker has so much variation in temperature that having a few of these ($5 each) to slide around on your grill surface are amazingly helpful. Sure, you can open your smoker and use an IR thermometer, for example, to check the temp on your GrillGrates (versus your regular grills), but being able to simply open the top and look and see the temp at several places is awesome.

Plus, when we travel and rent a home or apartment with a BBQ, I can drop a few of these on the grill to get a sense of what I have going for (or against) me

[Lost in China]

They're great, and indispensable, but I find that mine just takes up a lot of space on the grill. I don't want it to touch the food, and I don't want it to be in the way, but it's difficult to do. Maybe it's my 17" grill. It also gets barbecued and smoked sitting on the grill, and mine is heavily stained and almost unreadable. It's on the inside of the glass and on the dial face, so I can't clean it. The rest of you don't have this problem? Otherwise they are irreplaceable, I agree. I wouldn't cook without one. This site said it best, cooking is science and science needs data. BBQ = time + temperature.

[David C]

Lost in China -- Great points. My grill is quite a bit wider, which helps on size. As to getting stained, until tonight, they have just gotten kind of sooty and I've been able to wipe them clean. Then tonight I made the Teriyaki Pork Belly from this site, and the dials have some very serious stickiness on them, that I'm still working to clean. So a panacea, no, but a tool, definitely!