The thermometers built into the grill which is on the mounted to the top of the grill reads 100°F higher than a thermometer inside of the grill.
One or both of these are true:
- The temperature is actually different at those two locations.
- One or both thermometers are wrong (broken, miscalibrated, etc.).
It’s the first one. I can tell you for sure that there is a huge temperature gradient inside the grill from the distance from the cooking grates to the inside of the lid. The lid thermometer is somewhere between 10-14" away from the grates, in most models.
That’s also why the upper rack is a “warming” rack and not a “cooking” rack (despite some manufacturers - coughweber - trying to include it in the cooking area total).
And the lid thermometer is usually on the lid. Where there’s cold air on the other side.
Eh. The probe is inside the air, more or less away from the lid (which is still very quite hot)
Heat rises.
The thermometer in the lid is at the top of the thermal stack. The one on the grill near the bottom.
Heat rises, cheapo thermometers aren’t super accurate.
If you can get access to the probe itself, try the two easy extremes… boiling water and ice water. See how far off they are. They will be off, it just depends by how much.
Of course the important metric when it comes to cooking food isn’t the air temp, but the temp inside the food, which is why an internal thermometer is what most people go by.
I suspect it has something to do with how far away the thermometer is from the actual heat source. you can hold your hand over a flame and be relatively fine, but if you stick your hand directly into flame, you will be burnt.
The thermometer on my last cheap grill worked once and then always said 300°.
Ouch. Sorry to hear that
