Food cooks by three methods:
- Conduction: food heats by contact with a hot surface such as the grate on the grill or a pan.
- Convection: hot air molecules bounce around inside the grill cavity and barrage the food.
- Radiation: infrared rays, if you use GMG’s open flame technology, heat the food.
The grill’s thermal sensor retrieves data from inside the grill. The computer on the control panel analyses the data and responds by adjusting the air flow inside the grill and the pellet flow into the firebox.
Here’s the crux: the data gathered by the PT100 platinum sensor can be erratic. Think about all of the things that affect this data – the cover being opened and closed, wind, cold food, grease splattering on the drip tray, humidity, altitude, and even how level the grill is (which can affect pellet flow into the firebox – gravity!).
So the computer receives all of this data, averages it over time, and provides a reasonably accurate display of the overall temperature inside your grill.
This is why an instant air temperature reading from a 3rd party product such as Maverick, does not really provide much useful information.
Your food cooks, as we’ve learned, by a combination of all three methods. The instant reading tells you only one piece of information from a tiny portion of the total space inside the grill cavity. it does not tell you the whole picture. A reading from one cubic millimeter of a cavity in which there are about 83 million cubic millimeters is not a microcosm of the cavity temperature.