ThermoHawk 200 Touchless Thermometer - Playing with the ThermoHawk
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What started as innocent testing of the ThermoHawk rapidly degraded into what I call a play session. This little gadget can be extremely entertaining.
Here's a picture of the ThermoHawk sitting in the palm of my hand. I've disabled the flash so the screen is readable, so pardon if it looks a little dark. The main thing is that it read the surface temperature of my hand to be 96.5 degrees F. After a quick test with a strip thermometer, I got the same exact reading. So far, so good.
I then opened my computer and moved it close to the CPU to read the temperature. It gave me a reading of 73.5 degrees. So I deferred to the front of the case, to see what the CPU sensor told me. I was greeted with a reading of 23 degrees Celsius. A quick conversion of 73.5 F to C comes up with 23.05. Again, this is an amazingly close comparison.
But now I got silly. In the next five minutes I found out that the glass shelves in my refrigerator were 39 degrees, while a frozen pound of ground beef in my freezer had a surface temp of 3 degrees. The water in the pot on the stove (we were making macaroni and cheese) was at a mere 140 degrees, while the burner itself was chugging at 215 degrees.
So here I was in the kitchen playing with the new toy, when one of my kids opened the dishwasher and reported that the dishes within were not clean. We just got a new dishwasher a couple of months ago, and have been having a periodic problem with the dishes being cleaned. So out came the instruction manual for some troubleshooting.
It seems that some dishwashers have pre-heating elements in them, to heat the water to a specified temperature before beginning to wash the dishes. My old dishwasher must have had this, but my new one does not. According to the manual, my water should be at a temperature of 140 degrees to effectively clean my dishes. Not only that, but any setting less than 130 degrees can allow bacterial growth within your hot water heater's tank.
So I turned the hot water on in the sink and let it run until it reached its hottest temperature, then captured some in a glass and tested it with the ThermoHawk. 115 degrees. I tested again, same thing. A third test using a cooking thermometer showed me the same thing. I needed to increase the temperature in my hot water heater (for more than one reason). Now, if that's not a practical use of the ThermoHawk, then what is?
Next: Conclusion >>
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