Mellow Sous Vide

Anyone else see the announcement of the new Mellow machine? Looks very interesting, but not sure I can wait until next year.

Thoughts on the cooling / heating process?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiNmTI51GPw

http://cookmellow.com/meet-mellow/

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Johan_Edstrom_5586

*specifications subject to change during development

It doesn't really say much.

Brendan_Lee_56950

That is a pretty cool idea. Seems to be geared towards smaller cooks due to the bath size but the cooling function would be awesome to have. I think the interaction with the smartphone and the cooling feature will find their way into a lot of our appliances in the near future.

DiggingDogFarm_65362

Great idea.....it would make a nice aquarium too! : )

mike.minasian

I think some of the innovations (if you can call them that) in this product (the cooling, weight sensor, app integration) could make daily sous vide cooking significantly more approachable. What's also nice is that if you do want to do something more sophisticated you can via a manual process. This takes some of the guesswork out of the implementation of a "timer" functionality, which has been the subject of some debate previously.

Size is certainly a consideration, and while I couldn't want anything bigger sitting on a counter or even dining table, I could see wanting something bigger for larger cooks and not having as much flexibility.

Johan_Edstrom_5586

@Martin or warm pickled herring container.

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Hey guys,

I'm the founder/designer/actor in the video. Glad Chefsteps discovered us, I just asked Chris for permission to come post yesterday!

I'm happy to field any questions you might have. I'm super excited that everyone seems to find Mellow agreeable and possibly useful.

On the specifications: That's a boilerplate disclaimer, we're not anticipation anything changing significantly. There's a few things like noise level and power consumption that are really hard to boil down to hard numbers pre-production, but heating and cooling power shouldn't vary much. Is there anything I can clear up?

Johan_Edstrom_5586

Zé Pinto Ferreira - Awesome, thanks for chirping in. 10 minutes, I am guessing 1200W or whatever is applicable for 115V?

Jack_Mayer_85396

Looks very interesting. Price point (approx)?

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Glad to be here Johan. I actually spend a lot of time looking at this forum, but I'm not much of a posting-person.

We haven't gone above 1000 Watts for material reasons, and even that is pretty much overkill for so little water.You can have a look at our spec page, kinda buried here: http://cookmellow.com/inside-and-out/

Jack, we're pre-selling for $400, with a referral program that knocks off $20 for each friend that purchases through your link. When we finish the pre-sale, the price will climb to $500.

Johan_Edstrom_5586

I think the phone interaction is the really cool part.

Now I found the specs

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Thanks! the phone interaction is what makes the whole thing come alive, it's so much more than just remote control. The idea of acting physically on digital feedback is mind boggling when you apply it as a creator.

t.stanoulis

This is a great idea, very cool. It looks like it will be a huge engineering effort to make a seamless system from software to hardware to the networking advantage. How big is your team?

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Really small, actually! We're leveraging technology other companies have built, namely Electric Imp. Seamless, robust network integration is ten times easier to implement than it was even 3 years ago, thanks to well-funded platform companies. This standardisation/cost sharing allows companies like our own to do the creative work without having to worry too much about the plumbing.

Brendan_Lee_56950

So far it looks pretty great. What kind of testing have you done for continuous use? 48, 72, 100 cooks may not be frequent but I do them occasionally.

Matt_67991

Huge fan of this idea. Cooling, remote control.

Does the remote sensor allow for notifications for power outages?

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Hi Brendan, thank you for the compliment. We haven't done proper third-party testing yet, but in my own cooks I do 48 hours regularly. I don't think we've exceeded that very much with the latest prototype.

As we move closer to production, we'll do much more extensive testing which I'll be happy to update you on. Part of that testing will be continuous runtimes over 100 hours. We have no reason to believe Mellow will have any sort of problem with that type of use, it's definitely what it's being designed for.

Hi Henri, thank you too! Yes, you'll be notified of any power outage during use, and we'll be able to deal with any food you have cooking automatically, too.

Chris_Young_80640

Zé:

First, thank you for asking before posting. We're appreciate that consideration. I'd love to hear more about the peltier cooling device (I'm assuming you're using a peltier device for the 50 watts of cooling). I assume that the use case is that the device would be filled with cold water and cold food and 50 watts of cooling power, combined with the double-walled insulated vessel would be enough to lower and maintain the temperature between 2-5 °C? I'm assuming you won't be able to cool the mass of water and food from cooking temperatures down to safer refrigerator temperatures in a reasonable amount of time.

Also, curious why you went with Electric IMP versus something like the TI CC3300 SmartConfig approach?

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Hi Chris,

Don't mention it, it's just good manners. I admire ChefSteps and what you're building here, and it'd be awful to be a polluter.

You're right on the peltier, and right on the use case: We assume Mellow will generally be loaded with 2-4 portions of cold food, and about 2-3 liters of ambient-temperature water. The peltier is sized to bring all of that mass back down to refrigerator temperatures fairly quickly (around 4ºC like you mentioned), and keep them there indefinitely.

Cook-chill, unfortunately, is just not possible with our system right now. The amount of cooling you'd need to have is gigantic.

Going with the Imp comes down to the three things a like ours startup needs: speed, leverage, and peace of mind. By going with the Imp we can iterate much faster, don't have to touch assembly-level code, and we know our business matters. I'd be happy to go into more detail, but that's probably a topic best left for email.

Chris_Young_80640

Zé, indeed water is an power-consuming beast when you really want to start changing it's temperature quickly ;-)

Johan_Edstrom_5586

If this thing actually had a "lid" and a liftable tray (Yes, I do write robotics stuff, mostly process side though) - couldn't you let the item cook, raise above waterline, then lid and chill from below?

Z_Pinto_Ferreira_78055

Possibly Johan, I welcome suggestions for version 2 (and competition if you want to step in the game

karen_432789

do we have a date it will be out yet?