Fitting the oven thermometer

Before I start burning stuff, I want to know what temperature my oven is. A pyrometer was way too expensive for me, so my cheap fix for this was a PID temperature controller - the sort of thing you'd usually use to control the temperature of a kiln. The one I bought was from www.auberins.com and cost me less than £20. I bought my thermocouples from there too - pretty good for under £4 each! I bought the ones rated to 1000C - hopefully should be plenty. They've been buried in a variety of parts of the oven - fortunately I took extensive notes:


Another reason to sort this out before the fires - I'll end up accidently burning the notes... I also picked up a rotary thermocouple selector off ebay for £5. I've no idea where you'd get one of these from apart from ebay, but it allows you to select 1 of 12 different thermocouples.

I mounted them both in a bit of scrap aluminium (offcuts from chequer plating that I took off a Landrover several years ago). After a bit of work with sandpaper and wire wool it looked presentable.


The rotary dial lets me select which thermocouple I look at - the power supply to the unit is fed in through a cable I buried in the masonry a long time ago. I can look at the inside of the oven (thermocouple number 1) ...

Only at 42C at the moment - the halogen light was off for most of the day when I was fitting all this. Or I can look at the outside of the oven (thermocouple number 6) ...

11C in the base of the oven walls - I guess this will be an average of the outside temperature over the last few weeks as there's a fair few tons of concrete there to heat up and cool down. This closes off the lower front brick hole, and will remove the irriation of people asking me how the pizzas fit in that tiny hole...