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Signal vs. Fireboard 2

Discussion in 'Food Talk' started by TaquitoBandito, Sep 29, 2020.

  1. Sep 29, 2020 at 6:38 PM
    #1
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

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    I'm looking for a backup in case my RecTeq probes ever crap out and I've narrowed it down to the Signal by Thermoworks or a Fireboard 2.

    Do any of you own them and if you do, any pros & cons that you can think of?
     
  2. Sep 30, 2020 at 2:07 PM
    #2
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

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    I ended up buying a Fireboard 2 with some extra probes. I didn't like the fact that it only comes with 2 probes but I read the Signals battery life is only 16 hours and it takes 12 hours to charge it. I believe the Fireboard is over 20 hours before it needs to be charged. Both will work while they are charging but still...
     
  3. Sep 30, 2020 at 3:24 PM
    #3
    FrenchToasty

    FrenchToasty The Desert rat, 6 lug enthusiast

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    Are these auxiliary temp probes for your smoker?
    I kinda wish I went fancier with mine, but the simplicity of the inkbird is pretty nice. I got the 4 prober, but only use 3 so far; one grate probe, and I’ll use the other two on a big piece of meat or two seperAte steaks or whatever. It graphs, but doesn’t save the graph from when you opened the App last which kinda sucks
     
    TaquitoBandito[OP] likes this.
  4. Sep 30, 2020 at 3:31 PM
    #4
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

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    Yep - I wanted some backup probes, just in case the RecTeq ones crap out in the middle of a cook. I thought about the inkbird (definitely liked the price better) but I wanted the ability to save the graph.
     
    FrenchToasty[QUOTED] likes this.
  5. Sep 30, 2020 at 3:48 PM
    #5
    FrenchToasty

    FrenchToasty The Desert rat, 6 lug enthusiast

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    I haven’t followed the grill/smoke thread in a bit, have you smoked anything yet, lay it on me! I’m doing a 11# pork butt this weekend for a bday party. I wanted to do a prime brisket in the freezer aswell, but I also don’t want to share the brisket!!! Haha same thing with some st Lewis ribs I’ve got hiding inside the freezer. I’ve been getting down on some jerky lately, but haven’t perfected my marinade yet, but this last batch I smoked w Mesquite pellets and that tasted really good
     
  6. Sep 30, 2020 at 5:34 PM
    #6
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

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    That's funny - I picked up an 8# Pork Butt today to smoke this weekend. I'm kind of a pulled pork addict so it could be dangerous for the family. I did my first ever brisket last weekend - a 16# Prime from Costco. Salt & pepper rub at 275 for 10.5 hours.
    I did a 4# dino rib for my first smoke last week. Salt & Pepper rub at 285 for 8 hours. It came out pretty good but for some reason I thought it would cook a lot longer (I think I've read too many BBQ books and got my methods mixed up). I ended up holding it in our oven for 4 hours until my wife got home.
    Tomorrow I'm smoking two 4# beef plate ribs (one for us and one for our neighbor). It'll be, you guessed it, a salt & pepper rub at 285. I made my neighbor a deal that if he bought some meat, I'd smoke it the same time I'm doing ours. He's an older, retired teacher and we were basically feeding him nightly until this Covid thing started up, so I'm glad I can do that for him again.
    I have a rack of pork spare ribs to smoke this weekend at some time too. Gonna make a slather and do salt & pepper rub for them.
    Do you do any mustard based sauces for your Pork Butt?
    I plan on learning the smoker and going basic on the meat until I master the cooks, then I'll start experimenting with sauces, sides, and marinades. Right now my go to sauce is Franklin's BBQ. That dude has things figured out.
    Bought 200# of RecTeq pellets with my smoker so I'll be using them for a while :)
     
    Cfincke and aperezsh like this.
  7. Sep 30, 2020 at 5:42 PM
    #7
    FrenchToasty

    FrenchToasty The Desert rat, 6 lug enthusiast

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    Haha you went balls deep!
    That’s very nice of you for making meals for your neighbor. I bet he’s stoked you got a smoker!!!!
    So it sounds like you’ve done way more beef, and me more pork maybe. My dad usually burnt stuff......so it was always simple; we never did ribs let alone beef or pork. So I’m learning a lot about a bunch of different cuts and different animals, it can be confusing! There’s a local butcher, well two, that i frequent, but the newest one has been blowing it out of the water! Forbes Meat Co. not sure if they ship, but I might do one of the aged ribeyes from him. The regular ones changed my perspective of ribeyes. I never was a fan......... now all I want it ribeyes! And I too like SP!! I like hand/fresh cracked pepper, I’m about to hook my drill up to the pepper mill due to the amount of pepper I need!
     
  8. Sep 30, 2020 at 7:46 PM
    #8
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

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    :)

    Have you read "Franklin BBQ: a Meat-Smoking Manifesto"? It has everything you need to know about smoking a brisket or ribs and a lot of good info about picking meat. He's on two episodes of a show called "The Chef Show" and he shows you how to trim the brisket (talks about it in the book, but seeing it always works better for me) and how he knows when the brisket is ready to be wrapped by touch. His instructions for smoking a brisket are pretty much "cook it until it's done." Nothing fancy but his BBQ restaurant goes through something like 100 briskets a day. So I'm trying to absorb his way of doing it.

    My wife (a native Austinite) is a brisket and beef rib nut so that's why I started with it. I had to make up for spending so much damn money on the smoker.

    Our big grocery story in Texas is HEB and they carry some really good meat. They have a couple flagship stores in Austin called "Central Market" and it's like the best of the best is carried there. Last weekend I was looking for some good pepper and I found Brisket Pepper.
    lillies-q-brisket-pepper.jpg
    It was on sale for $4.99 a bottle so I bought a bunch of it while I wait for my Cuisinart Coffee Grinder to get here so I can start grinding my own.

    Damn, I love a good ribeye. How do you cook yours?
     
    aperezsh likes this.
  9. Oct 4, 2020 at 11:18 AM
    #9
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

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    Retrax Pro XR, Desert Eagle Plate, Seat Jackers, Kenwood DMX1037S
    I can't say I'd recommend the Fireboard 2. It came Friday, which was awesome. You download the an app for it and then, inside the app, you give it permission to use your bluetooth and connect the bluetooth to your phone. After that, it's supposed to show up automatically on the app and you can hook it up to your wifi.

    I couldn't get past the connect the bluetooth to my phone. It would connect for a second and then disappear. When I tried to refresh the app it would say there are no Fireboard devices available. Reset the Fireboard, uninstalled and reinstalled the app, turned off the bluetooth on the phone, turned it back on, turned off the phone, tried using my wife's phone, and every combination in-between for more than an hour. There's a diagnosistic area on the Fireboard and it would flash "Bluetooth: -35db" for a second on my phone and say "-42db" on my wife's phone.

    That wasn't the kicker though. I went to Fireboard's website and realized there is no Contact number that I could find. "Support" is a link that goes to their Knowledgebase which is pretty much the instructions written in an infinite loop... "If it doesn't connect, try the steps in our Knowledgebase". "Contact us" is an email form that prompts you to check their knowledgebase before you fill it out. I was able to find a phone number on the printed instructions and when I called it, it asked if I knew my party's extension. Then you can press "1" for support or "0" to leave a message. When you press "1" for support, it asked me to leave a message.

    After all of this (filling out a form, calling and leaving a message) a man emailed me and said that he was talking to another customer when I called and asked if I wanted to troubleshoot or return and attached the link to instructions on returning. I wrote back, asking if the "-35db" thing was normal and he said he didn't know because I wasn't able to get the Fireboard 2 online so he couldn't look at it. At this point, I told him I'd like to return it and he said that he had emailed me a link to the instructions.

    Basically, instead of sending me a prepaid slip, I have to pay to send it to them. If it doesn't work for them, I get a full refund plus shipping costs. If it decides to work for them, it sounds like I'm out on the shipping charges and I could be charged a restocking fee.

    I get that they may be a small business and Covid could be messing up their staffing or whatever, but this is pretty much a $300 thermometer that wouldn't work out of the box. Plus, I think they use their Fireboards in Yoder Smokers. I would think they'd have a better staffed support team. A "that doesn't sound right, let's get another one out to you right away and send that one back to us" would have been a good response. Not "did you do the steps in the Knowledgebase?"

    I ended up buying a Thermoworks Signal (should be here Tuesday). Hopefully that experience turns out better.
     
  10. Oct 9, 2020 at 1:19 AM
    #10
    OV-1794

    OV-1794 New Member

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    I've had the signals for a couple months and I like the ability to monitor the temp while I'm gone or in my shop. I haven't had any real connectivity issues with it. The only real issue I've had is when I switch out of the app on my phone to do go to another app or internet, when I pull it back up the temp doesn't always update. Usually when that happens I just close the app completely and reopen and it's good. I've set the alarms and haven't had issues with them alerting my phone. Cooked multiple pork shoulders, brisket, 5-6 whole chickens, pork chops, tri tips, Ribeyes and probes seem to be pretty dead on with my thermopop instant read.
     
    TaquitoBandito[OP] likes this.
  11. Oct 9, 2020 at 2:02 PM
    #11
    TaquitoBandito

    TaquitoBandito [OP] SSEM #91, KitKat Aficionado, A Dancer for Money Exotic Dancer

    Joined:
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    Joel (AKA Bif)
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    2020 Army Green TRD Pro Crewmax
    Retrax Pro XR, Desert Eagle Plate, Seat Jackers, Kenwood DMX1037S
    Fireboard received my return yesterday (cost around $17 to ship back to them). I wrote them this morning about a timeline for a refund and they said that it should be today and that I could of had another shipped out with a return label for the bad unit.

    I told them I wish I had been given that option.

    I get notification that they accepted the return. However, rather than paying back my shipping, they deducted their Fedex shipping charges from my return.

    I wrote them again and asked why. They said they were able to get it to work but it needed a firmware upgrade. I wrote them back and said that in order to get the firmware upgrade I would have needed to connect to wifi. In order to connect to wifi, I needed to connect to bluetooth, which I was unable to do because it needed the firmware upgrade.

    They then said they'd refund their shipping charge but not mine because I had the option to get a new unit and I chose to return it instead. THEY NEVER GAVE ME THAT OPTION. I sent my earlier conversations back to them and quoted their return policy where they say they'll refund your shipping charges.

    At this point, I'll NEVER purchase anything from them again or recommend them to anyone. I'm sure their product is great if you can get it to work. Buyer beware if you cannot. A $17 lesson learned.
     

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