When you do change the battery, use a common AAA battery. The motion-sensing sleep mode and light-sensing backlight mean fewer battery changes. Depending on backlight usage, battery life has gone from 1,500 to 3,000 hours.
#MK4 THERMAPEN PROFESSIONAL#
Professional chefs and backyard grillers will be eager to grab the latest Thermapen as it boasts lots of new features and combines some functions of other popular models. The issue is that the symptoms don't fit the what you would normally expect from what actually caused the problem.The much-anitcipated release of the Thermapen Mk4 came one day early as the company decided to push up the launch date. I'm posting this just so someone who encounters the same thing doesn't waste time contacting Thermapen or trying to fix something that isn't actually broken.
![mk4 thermapen mk4 thermapen](https://52brews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MK4-Thermapen-300x235.jpg)
My purpose in posting this is to help those of you who might experience similar problems. So, at least with my unit, the batteries ran out much sooner than what Thermapen predicted, and the battery failure symptoms were not at all what I was expecting. These batteries should not have failed, but they did. Even if it always was left to time out, my usage over the past three years comes to 300 x 5 = 1,500 minutes. I often forget to close it, so it times out after five minutes. In three years since I got the replacement that would bee 300 times I've used it. Measuring temperature over the range of -49.9 to 299.9 ☌ and used by hundreds of thousands of discerning cooks worldwide, it offers a combination of speed, accuracy and convenience of use. So, it is on and off perhaps 100 times a year. The NEW Thermapen One thermometer is the latest model of the UK’s number one selling food thermometer, Thermapen. I use my thermometer once a week when making yogurt and for all other uses it probably also averages out to once a week. According to Thermapen, this shouldn't have happened at all because the batteries are rated at 1,500 hours. Even though it didn't "feel" like a low battery, that is what it was. When fresh, they should generate a little more than 3.0 volts. The Thermapen is powered by two 2032 primary cell (i.e., not rechargeable) "coin" batteries. Since I am a geeky engineer, I have a dedicated battery tester that tests batteries under load and provides exact voltage measurements. However, I figured I should at least check the batteries, even though this didn't feel like a battery problem and even though Thermapen guarantees the batteries for 1,500 hours of operation (see below: I was two orders of magnitude short of that figure).
![mk4 thermapen mk4 thermapen](https://i.redd.it/3btsbtf66dr51.jpg)
Since I'd had experienced that switch failure three years ago, all I could think was, "oh darn, here it goes again, and this time it won't be covered under warranty." I figured I was going to have to spend $100 on a new one. Over the ensuing weeks, after this first started to happen, the number of open/close operations required to get the thing working again kept increasing. However, I thought perhaps it was a variation of the same problem. When the switch malfunctioned, it just quit working. I then closed and then re-opened the probe, and this time it would work. I would open the probe, and I would get no display. Then, several months ago, it appeared to be doing the same thing, but this time it was intermittent. I contacted Thermapen and they replaced it under warranty. The symptoms don't fit the what you would normally expect from what actually caused the problem, so you might be tempted to do the wrong thing.Ībout three years ago, the on/off switch in my Thermapen (it gets activated when you open the probe) malfunctioned.