Reviews of TEMPer USB Thermometer w/ Alerts

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List Price: $24.99
Sale Price: $21.97
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I had no unreasonable expectations about this product, since I knew it would be thermally coupled to the (warm) computer through the rather short usb cable extension, but this device far underachieved even my rather low expectations. In short, it has three shortcomings I discovered after a brief testing:

1) If you attempt to measure a temperature slightly above 37 C, it will get "stuck" at 37.00 C, which is a very suspicious property. Only if the temperature exceeds 39 C will it get "unstuck", and produce a higher temperature reading. The curve plotted by the nice software bundled with the device makes this "bug" obvious.

2) It has an obvious hysteresis: the temperature reading in the same room depends on the starting temperature of the device (if you pre-heat it or pre-cool it, the final reading is different, after a reasonable equilibration time). The hysteresis is more than 2.0 C, which is unacceptable.

3) It significantly over-estimates the ambient temperature, probably due to the thermal coupling with the computer.

On the plus side, I can only say that I love the software bundled with it, with curve plotting etc. I only wish the thermometer itself was accurate to at least 1.0 F (0.56 C), which is all I needed.

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For years, I have wanted to remotely monitor the temperature in server rooms. These are the type of rooms that if one industrial air condioner dies, the room gets very hot very quick. So it would be nice to know the room temperature without having to visit the site in person.

Other similar products I have looked at over the years, have cost at least $200. The misers I worked for, would not go for that.

I was thrilled to see this device at this price. I immediately ordered two without hesitation. The included software works, but it is not the greatest. I used third party software called UTAC. (USB TEMPer Advanced Control) UTAC sets up a nice little web server that displays a nice graph of the current temperature. Very nice. It also allows configuring low and high temperature thresholds with automatic e-mail alerts. Even better! No worries about temperature. I will receive automated temperature alerts now.

This device + UTAC = Great capability at a great price.

A welcome addition to our server room. No complaints.

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I think both of the previous reviewers suffer from a bit of unrealistic expectations. The TEMPer is $9, after all, significantly less expensive than other USB thermal probes. They advertise 2 deg C (+/1.8 deg F) accuracy, and my experience with two of them bears this out. All I wanted was something to get into the ballpark for remote thermal monitoring with automated notification for over-temp. This does the trick quite nicely. I also am not sure what the beef is with the included software. Although it does not provide for automated FTP upload like UTAC does, it does include automated e-mail notification, automated data logging to both text and CSV, and basic plotting all at user specified collection intervals. Also allows for error compensation when calibrating against a more accurate thermometer. The included USB extension cable serves to decouple the probe from the computer if needed. Only had them up and going for a few days but so far no obvious glitches. Is basically no accompanying documentation but was not difficult to figure out. If it had cost more I would have rated it lower, but at this price I don't know what more anyone could reasonably expect.

Honest reviews on TEMPer USB Thermometer w/ Alerts

This item is a very cheap chinese import. The package and documentation have many mispelled words. I only mention that because it also matched the quality of the product: bad. The driver installer did not work, so I had to manually mess with the files to install it. It read a constant 83 whether it was in a 70 degree office or a 20 degree freezer. The seller was great about a quick refund, but didn't even want me to ship the item back. Just plain junk.

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While this thermometer is cheap in comparison to other USB thermometers, it does the job well on a computer running XP. Unfortunately, the software it comes with is poor to say the least, but that isn't a problem because there are some really good alternatives such as UTAC (freeware). With UTAC, TEMPer becomes a very useful tool enabling email alerts upon temp changes, webserver monitoring and other neat features.

On the downside, on comparing the performance of two TEMPers I found that they deviated by about 1 degree celcius, so you might want to calibrate TEMPer against a more accurate thermometer (possible in UTAC). While TEMPer might be good for monitoring server room temperatures, if you want to monitor freezer or external temperatures you will need TEMPerNTC which has a waterproof probe.