The device is failing to maintain temperature at higher temperatures, even with small water volumes. I filled a 12 liter polycarbonate bin with only 8 liters of water, and the circulator could not maintain a temperature set at 185. The temperature varied constantly by over a degree, hopping from 182 to 183 to 184 and back to 182, and was not able to reach the set temp, even with the bin covered. Higher temperature goal (i.e. 190 to 194) had more variation and lagged the set temperature by more than one degree constantly.
Such a small amount of water (only two gallons) and those temperatures should be well within the Anova’s capability, but it couldn’t do it.
Has anyone else experienced something similar? Conversely, has anyone been successful at getting the Anove to hold steady at the 185+ degree mark?
Something seems to be degrading because now the unit cannot maintain a temperature above 175 F. I put 8 liters of water in the bin, set the temp to 190, and the bath never climbed above 174. I put in a claim for a return/exchange last week, but haven’t heard back.
I wonder if moving from the 1000 watt element in the previous Anova circulator to the 800 watt element in this one leaves it too underpowered to heat according to specs. Either that or my unit is faulty.
Has anyone else had problems heating above 175? Perhaps I should preorder the nomiku.
It’s possible that there is nothing wrong with the unit, and it’s just underpowered to hold higher temps. I but together a styrofoam sleeve and cover for my 12 quart polycarbonate bin by cutting up and duct taping some cheap styrofoam coolers. With the bin insulated on all sides by styrofoam, the unit would maintain 200 degrees.
Without insulation on the 12 quart bin, it couldn’t maintain 194 degrees, even with only 8 quarts of water, which is less than half of the unit’s capacity according to its specs.
Without insulation on the 4.75 gallon bin (but with only 2,5 gallons of water) the unit could not achieve 175 degrees. That lesser performance would be expected from an underpowered unit given the higher surface area (and this higher potential heat loss) of the bigger bin.
My question is whether my experience indicates a problem unit or a unit that is operating properly in that it is underpowered and simply cannot achieve higher temperatures without insulating the bin?
Can someone at ANOVA speak to this? Is it unreasonable to expect the unit to heat 3 gallons of water to 175 degrees in a 4.75 uninsulated polycarbonate bin?
I’m not anxious to return the unit if its replacement will behave the same way.
I just discovered this problem today, extremely frustrating to buy a unit that is designed for sous vide cooking and yet it cannot even maintain over 175* at smaller volumes of water than rated. I even preheated the water on the stove before dumping it into my Cambro container and it instantly started falling in temperature by a degree every few minutes. Nothing is said about this in the product description, and cooking vegetables at 183-193* is an extremely common use for people buying immersion circulators.
As stated above, I’m not sure there’s any point in an exchange unless Anova says for certain that this wattage should be able to do that and ours are defective, mine didn’t have an issue the first few times I used it at 135*.
So I’ve now used this thing a total of four times in over five weeks and am out of their 30 day return policy, after waiting a year or more for something that I find out is underpowered I’m not very happy to say the least.
Thank you Mindflux for the information. That would tend to indicate that my unit is not behaving properly. Still, I’d love to hear from others as to whether this problem is replicating. I think it’d also be useful to the Anova folks and to potential customers to receive feedback on the device’s performance.
Regarding my return request, I’m still waiting to hear from somebody from Anova. Despite the comment above from nvaughn promising a response ASAP, I still haven’t received any feedback or indication from anyone as to status.
This makes me wish I had ordered mine with my AMEX as they extend the warranty period by a year. Of course I have to call Amex about that and not Anova. I imagine they just reimburse me so I could buy another if it failed in 2 years time
I just ran my unit in an uncovered aluminum crockpot with 5.2 liters of water at 90c (194f) for about 15 minutes with no problems maintaining the temperature.
I am a bit concerned with the unit’s ability to handle the steam generated at these temperatures. The outside of the controller was damp, and it’s been behaving oddly ever since I turned it off. I think that it thinks that somebody is holding down the play button because it would switch the temp then turn on the timer. After that it’s kinda frozen and I can’t actually start it up, but I think that that might be a UI problem where it’s expecting me to set the timer.
I tested my brand new Anova One, at 130F, in a 7 1/2 quart Cambro container, and it couldn’t stabilize, but when I switched to a 5 gal. plastic tub, I got rock steady results. Last night I cooked a piece of cod fish, in a ten quart aluminum stock pot, at 130 degrees F, and it worked just fine. I haven’t tried anything at very high temps (180F) yet.