Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My rating doesn’t reflect a negative judgment on the quality of the instrument (it seems to measure temperature accurately) but because its title says it’s an oven thermometer, I’m rating it 2/5 to reflect that I think most people intending to use this as a home cook or baker will be disappointed. I was hoping to use it as an external oven thermometer, since my regular oven thermometer works great but I can’t see the reading without opening the oven door (and thus lowering the temperature). The problem is that by its nature, the temperature in an oven is constantly changing: when you set it to 350F, the heating element(s) or gas flame come on until the thermostat thinks it’s close to that temp, then they turn off for a bit and then back on again when the thermostat sees the temperature dropping too far, and so on, back and forth over and over. So your 350F oven is not a straight line of 350F but more of a sine wave with 350F as its intended average, undulating between, say, 325F and 375F as it cycles on and off. Regular oven thermometers (the kind I can’t read when they are in the oven, where they must be) have a long lag on their temperature reading. If you take a thermometer out of a hot oven and into room temperature air, its reading will take a long time to wind all the way back down to reflect its surroundings, and vice versa. This lag smooths out the extremes of the instantaneous temperature readings and settles on an average temperature, which is the actual data that I’m looking for as a baker/cook. This thermometer constantly updates its readings, so if you put it in an oven it’s very difficult to tell what the average temperature is. You can only tell whether you’re on the upswing or downswing. Even in a properly heated 350F oven, you will see fluctuations up and down, so using this thermometer to make sure your oven is at the desired temp is not feasible. If they had a version that showed a rolling average over a 2 minute span, it would probably do exactly what I was hoping. The search continues.