Bought a cheap flower cooler thermometer and it saved my whole Mother's Day weekend

I picked up a digital thermometer for my walk-in cooler on a whim for about $25. It was one of those little ones with a probe on a wire and a screen you stick outside. I put the probe right in the middle of my stock bucket. Turns out, my built-in cooler dial was off by almost 5 degrees, way colder than I set it. I had a bunch of peonies and ranunculus that were just not opening right, and I couldn't figure out why. After I saw the real temp, I adjusted the dial and within a day, everything started to wake up. I would have lost hundreds of dollars in product right before my busiest weekend. Has anyone else found a simple tool that fixed a big hidden problem like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

reese_hill1mo ago

Man, that's such a classic cooler problem. Did you check if the built-in dial is just broken or if it's maybe in a bad spot, like right next to the cold air vent? I've seen that throw everything off because it gets a direct blast. What did you end up setting the real temp to for getting those peonies to finally open up?

angela_knight1mo ago

Good point about the dial placement, @reese_hill. It makes you wonder if the whole unit needs a separate thermometer to get a true reading. What brand of cooler was giving you so much trouble?