Tonefish wrote:Nice Job Josh! ... and thank you for sharing all of the information. I visited Randy last week and Buckeye Roasters and have a BC-1-MD on the way. I did talk to him about the thermocouple placements so maybe the more he hears about it the more likely there may be a change in the future. Happy roasts!

Great news! Look forward to hearing your experience when you get yours!

William

Madman13 wrote:How do you find the controllability of that DC fan? Can you smoothly control it from low to high with smooth and predictable gradations?

Not sure yet, it sounds smooth but I'm going to test it with a meter or gauge soon. The Mercury controls heat/air thru an app, which is a bit awkward compared to turning a knob.

wrz0170 wrote:Great news! Look forward to hearing your experience when you get yours!

William

You bet William. I've appreciated hearing about your experiences too. Thanks for that! Happy Roasts!!

I will post some graphs soon but in summary, I can not compare to the stock probes because I replaced the stock probes with 2mm probes from mill city immediately upon receiving the roster (was not interested in starting out with the super thick [6mm i believe] probes it comes with).

What I can say is that the dual thermocouple probe in the bean temp position is an absolute advantage for me.. To have the omron controller and artisan to read the same temp is a major convinence.

The ET probe that I placed in the upper right of the drum is marginally more accurate then the one in the exhaust stack. It tracks along with bt exactly when there is no beans in the roaster telling me that it actually is reading the air temp that the beans are exposed to. The value from the et probe in the exhaust stack (stock location) varies in its correlation with temp of the drum location and is especially less acurate at very low fan setting. However most of the time it is not too far off.

The MET probe is giving me interesting data but I'm still figuring out how to best utilize it. It seems that it may be more responsive during the roast to gas and air changes and actually give me a better idea of where bt is heading (especially since I blocked off most of the vents except the portions closest to the burners, for some reason this had changed the behavior of the met reading significantly)

I got the Mill City 2mm TCs too, and here's some comparative data. I've been struggling with how different the OMRON reads to the other two. Not just lag and filtering due to its size, but it appears to be doing something else. I even went so far as to put in a TC with my old Fluke meter using the trier, and hand recording just for the sanity check. You can see, during the preheat, that all the TCs except the OMRON are tracking similarly, but the OMRON takes off for some reason. I looked into the manual and it is a pretty complicated device. I wonder if they do some calibration at the factory or at Buckeye?

Are you finding the OMRON as odd also?

After many roasts I find a +40F offset to the BT hits the cracks at expected temperatures. I've backed out that adjustment in the plotted data.

My Omron always reads within a degree or 2 max of phidgets bt. This seems like a potential thermocouple issue.. Are they all 2mm replacements from mill city?

The OMRON TC is the original TC from BC.

Tonefish wrote:The OMRON TC is the original TC from BC.

Edited post
I believe the difference in shape of the curve is due to the influence of the large thermal mass of the thick thermocouple that comes with the roaster which absorbs and releases heat slowly in comparison to the much thinner 2mm probes which have much less of a thermal mass and respond to changes in temperature much quicker.. As far as the higher tmax.. This is harder to surmise since you have both artisan and your fluke in agreement. How about disconnecting the omron thermocouple from the omron and hook it up to your fluke to troubleshoot