Joule Failure

Picked up 17lbs of USDA Prime brisket. Cured for 8 days. Smoked for 6 hours. Portioned, bagged and placed in the water baths. Thankfully, with all that meat, I split into two separate Cambros running side by side. 24 hours later....blinking orange light, room temp water in the Joule bath. Polyscience bath still running fine. Loaded up the app and it notifies me that Joule has lost power. No evidence of power loss anywhere else in the house (or on the PS unit 12" away). Frustrating to lose product after investing so much time, but worse still, now I've got trust issues with Joule. Not sure what led to loss of power, but seems like there could be opportunities to recover in such events built into the app. Couldn't the app send notification (better yet an alarm of some sort) with loss of power? Couldn't it restart automatically when power is restored? Why not record the time of power loss, the duration, the time the power was restored, and the temp of the bath at that time? While these may not prevent an event, they could help recover and mitigate the risk of product loss.

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Comments

fisher23

So sorry to hear that. I've had one power outage during a cook but caught it after only a few minutes. I would love to see where Joule tries to recover as well, even a notification as soon as it happens would help. There is a new notification tune coming in the next release of the app. I got the beta today and it is a lot louder. I haven't tried a power loss with it yet to see if the new notification tune gets triggered. I am going to flag Emmett.

@Emmett_Barton_12803 these are some good ideas.

Dan_Ahern_30344

Brian, I'm sorry to hear this, Can you please open up a support ticket in the app so Ellen and company can start tracking this? We are looking into it to see if we can figure out what happened (a quick look this morning and it looks a little odd). Our system is setup to send out a push notification when it loses connection and at least at first glance it is saying it did, which is doubly disappointing that you didn't receive anything.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention and hopefully we can get to the bottom of what happened.

lockgavin

That really sucks, I had similar problem with mine and wagyu short ribs

. I updated software to most recent and that seemed to have fixed the problem. I left it plugged in for 2 days and no problems - although I am still a bit gun shy about it and new product.

Someone also mentioned that if wrap funnels the steam heat around the unit, the unit may overheat from the constant steam.

Nice little set up you have there by the way!

wolfiegirl

While it's not happened to me, I am really sorry you had to deal with this issue. I can well imagine your frustration level! I'm also relieved that at least you had portioned the brisket into two. I have no doubt the CS team will solve the issue.

douglas_bd

Thanks Dan! I'll enter a ticket.

douglas_bd

I saw a post about the plastic wrap too. That's possible. I usually run it open but with the multiday cook I wanted to minimize evaporation. It was wrapped up tight everywhere except not tight against the Joule. Water vapor could've funneled past, but at only a 60c set point, it doesn't seem like it would be too abusive an environment. Not sure if overheating manifests as a power outage...maybe?

douglas_bd

I opened a ticket. One new update yesterday that I included when I entered the ticket: When I found Joule blinking orange, I opened the app and it reported that Joule had lost power and that the program was stopped. Without knowing timing of the stop, I didn't restart it. However, I did receive notification on my phone yesterday that my food was done cooking right on the original expected time. I don't know if these are pre-scheduled somehow, but since Joule hadn't been running for at least 24 hours prior and the app showed that it was off, I found it odd

Boyd_Garrett_31034

I've always had the feeling that the cook timer was just that, a timer. It seems like it gets kicked off when you start the cook and it just plods along, counting down the assigned time, without regard to anything else associated with the cook.

tshewman

FWIW, have run 60C+ cooks before (e.g. shanks 48hrs 62C) without issue and plastic+foil wrapped. So I don't think (??) that would funnel it to that extreme?

fisher23

When it did happen to me it was at high temp 75C. I hope CS can shed some light on the issue. Please let us know what you find out.

Jeremy_131558

Wait wait wait. You can see what MY machine is doing or has been doing? Creeeeeepy.

I'm sorry you have been having issue. The steam was something I worried about at first myself so I switched to the ping pong balls. Kind of a pain when adding product as they like to bounce around the kitchen. But my evaporative loss seems minimized.

Sorry for the hijack.

Damian_154327

Hi Dan,

This has happened to me 4 times now during an ongoing 24 hour cook. I've also tried to change locations at the house with Joule still loosing power. I hope you guys will find a fix for this.

Have a great weekend.

Dan_Ahern_30344

Hi Damian,

Can you create a support ticket so we do a deeper investigation into your unit? You can do it from inside the app or by going to https://support.chefsteps.com/hc/en-us.

Thanks!

stephanie_crawley_721130

My app is frozen saying I’ve lost power

I’ve unplugged it, moved to a different circuit, deleted and redone loaded the app. Still frozen. Help!