Glancing Askance: Taking the temperature

By MARC WOLLIN

Your morning routine may vary from mine, but it likely contains many of the same elements. You get up, put on a robe and some slippers, use the bathroom, and eventually head down to the kitchen. There you either start a pot of coffee or grab a cup, then get something from the fridge or cupboard for breakfast. You likely glance at your phone to see if there were any urgent emails or texts that popped up after you went to bed, and/or what major catastrophe is challenging the world. And then you look for the one empirical piece of information that you need to really start your day: the temperature outside your window.

For sure you want to know the chance of rain, how hard the winds will be blowing, if it will continue to be sunny or cloudy ... the full weather picture. But a glance at the outside world will give you the general vibe, and the only really quantifiably metric you need to know is how hot or cold it is. That determines the socks you pick out, the pants that make sense and the type of shirt to pull from your closet. Wool or cotton, short or long, heavy or light: all of those options can be sorted quickly based on that one number.

In order to answer that critical question, for approximately forever, we have had an indoor/outdoor thermometer sitting on our kitchen windowsill. Long before there were more connected devices, this little readout has let us know what the outside world is up to. As technology goes it wasn’t much, a little display, a long wire that stuck out under the screen, powered by a battery that lasted seemingly for years. Yes, we have smart speakers with digital assistants, cellphones that offer the complete NOAA forecast, and now even connected thermostats that change their readouts to show the outside as I walk by. And still both my wife and I glommed onto that tiny LED the first second we came into the kitchen.

That is until the outside temperature read “HH.H” I fiddled with it a bit, and integers popped back up. But as I settled it back into place the alphabet returned. More fiddling, more numbers. More settling, more alphabet. I picked it up and found two tiny screws on the back. Always up for a challenge, I took it down to my workbench and opened it up. Sure enough, you could see the lead from the probe had snapped off the little circuit board. I stripped the wire back to some copper, fired up the trusty soldering iron I had gotten when I was 13, and reattached it. That done, I snapped it back together, and reinserted the battery. The display flickered to life ... but in Celsius. Seems that when I pried it apart I inadvertently switched the units. I flipped the selector switch back and forth to no avail: it wouldn’t go back to Fahrenheit. And so until we as a country convert to the metric system (a process that has been rumored to be happening for at least as long as I’ve been alive), the device was only good if I lived in France. 

Oh well. The circuit board was dated 1995, so it had a pretty good run. But then came the usual question, What to replace it with? Punch “indoor/outdoor thermometer” into Amazon, and the first handful that come up are all wireless units. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense; no need to route a wire through a closed window, the ability to put the readout anywhere. But as always, the devil was in the details. The thermometer itself says, “-40F to 140F.” More than adequate. Wireless range, “100 feet.” Way more than we would need. But the batteries?  “Battery life in sensor decreases substantially below 30 degrees.” Huh? We live in colder climes, and I don’t want to change them every week in the winter. So I guess back to what we had.

I searched for a wired unit and picked one out. But then I spotted a note on the new unit: “To change the °F/°C units, take out the batteries first before switching the C/F button.” Could that be the case with the one we had? I ran downstairs and plucked it from the top of the trash heap in the workshop. I popped the battery out, slid the switch to “F,” put the battery back in and ... voila! Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit came to life! (Well, not really. He died in 1736, but his units woke up). I raced upstairs and reinstalled our friend back to its rightful spot. And the singular piece of data that starts my day was once again available. 

What’s the lesson? Don’t give up? Do things in the right order? Confirm you have the right choices in place before you give something power?  We’re talking thermometers here, but feel free to extrapolate that last one. 

Marc Wollin of Bedford always has cold feet, at least in terms of temperature. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.