Sunday, December 5, 2010

thermo indicator on metal cookware


When baking in the oven, once the food is cooked and on my plate, I put back on the oven mitt, and place the hot metal baking sheet back inside of the oven -to cool off. The reasoning for this is because if someone else in the house, happens upon the kitchen and touches the cookie sheet, they'd get singed. This may already exist, but anyway, my idea was for a cheap thermo indicator to be embedded into the side or rim of the metal cookie sheet. Preferably with a blue/red light diode to indicate cold/hot, or a thermometer to signify the temperature of the metal. Sort of like how some AA batteries have a power indicator that you push with your thumb. Only this one is meant to indicate 'not to touch'.

Ideally the whole metal grill/rack piece should change color to red when the temp is hot enough to burn human flesh...

The next application of this would be a sink faucet having an LED on the top of the spout, which indicates the heat level of the water coming out.

2 comments:

mentality said...

I think you've got the right idea for perhaps a slightly different application. I am pretty convinced that very few people would use the thermo-indicator on the somewhat remote chance that someone in the house will inadvertently singe themselves because they didn't realize that something was hot or not.

Here are two applications and a suggestion as to how to create the product:

There is a term called "teflon hands" referring to someone that has the ability to touch very hot things without protection. This product could be valuable to those who like to try their hand at handling hot things but would appreciate a warning indicator that even their teflon hands are about to get blistered.

A second application is the following: Person A is making dinner. Person B is on the way home from the office and runs into traffic. Person A doesn't want the food to over-cook as that will ruin it. The food is taken out of the oven and the thermo-indicator informs Person A whether or not the food is still sufficiently hot enough to eat by the time Person B gets home. If it thermo-indicator is red it's an indication that the food is still hot.Pink, pretty hot, blue green means it's still warm and blue means it's cold and needs to be re-heated.

If the thermo-indicator was a type of conductive tape with adhesive, it could be put onto the side of any kind of dish, corning ware, aluminum tray, baking pan etc. This would make the thermo-indicator more versitile and less expensive to produce, as opposed to your original idea of making it a part of a metal dish.

mentality said...

Whatever substance that is used for mood rings placed on a thick adhesive tape that can be used once and then thrown away. That way the consumers roll of thermo-tape runs out and they need to buy another one.