A new oven (mentioned in another thread) has one quirk that bugs me. It doesn’t display actual oven temperature, only setpoint. Is this common? I guess the thought could be “It maintains temperature, you don’t need to worry about”. Could just be my OCD kicking in.
The entire time, or only after it gets to the setpoint?
If I set mine to 400, it’ll count up to 400, beep, but then 400 will remain on the display until I turn it off, regardless of the actual temp in the oven. I think that’s pretty common. If you think about it, that’s no different than one with a dial. Also, I think it would drive people batty to see how far the air temp drops each time they opened the door. That and it would probably cause their tech support lines to overflow with people calling in because their oven temp, when set at (for example) 400 was fluctuating (as it’s supposed to) from 390-410, since it has a swing programmed in.
Or, are you saying that if you set it to 400, it shows “400” and that’s that. That might annoy me, but it’s not a big deal, and still, no different that it was with a dial. In fact, on ovens with a dial, I just turn them to and listen for the click (then turn it back up to where I want it) to see how close it is to being pre-heated.
It displays “Pre” while coming up to temperature, then beeps and displays setpoint.
That’s it. I used to work in industrial controls and if if two digital displays displaying the same analog signal didn’t MATCH, there was a crisis.
It’s more common than not for an oven to simply display the set temp. You’d have a very fancy-ass oven indeed if it displayed both, along with a lot of confused home cooks.
If you really need to know what the actual temperature is in there, get an oven thermometer. There’s a reason Alton Brown has touted them for decades (because most ovens don’t display that information).
In the old days, before electronic controls and digital displays, the only indicator of oven temperature was the temperature control knob.
My GE oven only displays the set point once it has come up to temperature. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an oven that displays the current temperature.
My oven has a useful feature regarding temperature display. It’s a convection oven with two convection settings: roast and bake. Air circulation makes heat transfer more efficient, so things cook faster when you use the convection feature. The convection bake setting figures out the temperature that would be equivalent to a non-convection oven. So, for example, if I set it for 350 degrees F, it will use a set point of something like 320 F. This allows the user to follow recipes without adjusting the temperatures or baking times.
FWIW, I always use an oven thermometer. That’s the only way to know for sure what the temperature is in there. They’re cheap.
I’ve never owned an oven that displays the actual temperature, only the set point.
You can get a thermometer to measure the actual temperature, but if you have OCD this will likely cause you more problems than it solves. If you set your oven for 350, it is not going to hold anywhere near a constant temperature of 350. More likely it will vary between something like 340 and 360 (or may swing even wider than that) and will only average out to 350.
Oven temperatures aren’t always that accurate either. It’s not like they calibrate these things with standards traceable back to the NIST.
Yes they’re cheap, but are they accurate?
My gf always relies on her oven thermometer. Setting the oven to 350, the thermometer reads 325, so she bumps up the dial. I bought another thermometer (the old one was pretty grungy) and its readout matched the dial. Maybe I’ll buy a third and look for a consensus.
A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
I guess I’m not surprised that they make some ovens that will display the actual temperature as well as the set point, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one.
You can see the set point on my oven by looking at the knob and what number is close to the mark at top-center.
I once calibrated all my household cooking thermometers by putting them in boiling water. The “liquid” ones were all pretty close to 212. The bimetallic ones were all over the place. I’ve stopped buying those.
All modern ovens can have their temperature controls calibrated.
I brought my Semiconductor-grade accuracy thermocouple temperature gauge over to my Mother-in-Law’s house and found that here oven was far off on the low end, but consistently off by 25° at any setpoint above 300°. After adjustment, it was dead-on at 300° and above.
I doubt there’s any oven that has a single temperature. The temperature of the racks and walls and the air in the oven at different places is going to vary. Unless your oven is waaayyyy off it doesn’t matter much to cooks. Consistency is what you need, not high precision accuracy.
You mean: Precision, not Accuracy.
I don’t think I meant high precision precision. And precision is not of much use, a 350.00000 degree oven is no more useful than a 350 degree oven.
Precision is repeatability.
Accuracy is, on average, how close you are to the target value.
So, if you don’t care about the absolute temperature very much, but you want the oven to be consistent, you want one that is precise, but not necessarily accurate.
Precision is the degree of accuracy. Consistency is repeatability.
A precise answer to the sum of 1+1 is 3.000000000. But it’s not very accurate. It can be a consistent answer, but so can the accurate one.
When I get an ISO compliant oven I’ll start using the terms that way. In the mean time I’ll use the definitions normal people* use.
*normal people = not engineers
I’ve had ovens that cooked consistently, and ovens with unpredictable and uneven heat. It makes a big difference, especially for baked goods.