Temperature inaccuracies - Pro 575

[Doug in Clovis]

I just got a Pro 575 as a birthday gift from my kids. (I have great kids!). I've been a charcoal/wood smoker for years and really want to love this new grill. The big problem I'm running into is the gross inaccuracy of the temperatures indicated by the grill. I have an excellent Thermoworks smoker thermometer that I've been using for years and have a lot of faith in. It's telling me the temperature indicated by the Traeger is pretty consistently 25F lower than the actual temperature in the cooking chamber. The temp was off by more than 50F before connecting to the internet and getting the latest software updates. Now I',m not usually a nitpicker and if it were only off by 5F or so I'd call that "close enough". But for the $700 price tag (on sale) I'm more than a little disappointed if a 25F error is the best Traeger can do.

My question to the forum is this: Have you experienced this problem? If you've had this issue how did you get it addressed? Did you contact Traeger and get a satisfactory response? Or, did you just work around it with a good thermometer and simply write it off to lousy quality control on the part of Traeger?

 

[bfletcher]

Congratulations on your new smoker and great kids! I'm not an expert and I have a different model but how I approach this is that my smoker is reporting the cabin temp from a single spot, which happens to be nowhere near where my meat is cooking. Consequently, I use it as a mere reference and I use a third party thermo to track temps near the meat.

I like the write-up from Fireboard, whose screenshot is below:

Good luck!

 

[MaD HuNGaRIaN]

Yes, it's being discussed in other threads. I have the same observation, it's 25º lower than indicated.

 

[Doug in Clovis]

Thanks all. I guess its one of those cases of getting our expectations properly adjusted.

I'll follow your lead and mostly ignore the temperature indicated on the smoker itself. It is comforting to observe that the Traeger meat probe is spot on, so, coupled with the meat probe on the Thermoworks unit I can accurately sample the meat at two places in addition to the cabin temp.

Cheers!