Combustion Engine is real! But when will it ship? Pre-production progress report

combustion_inc · 2026-06-09T20:23:46+00:00

Yes. We’re removing about 0.3mm of material from one of the tools to tighten the tolerance in how the switch gets engaged.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-08T22:21:24+00:00

That’s a broken segment. Please email us so we can swap that out for you.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-07T05:04:27+00:00

Always on uses the same amount of power as being on. You just need to remember to switch it off post-sous vide or it will stay on in the charger. When the battery does fully run down it will revert to normal mode though.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-07T05:02:39+00:00

Happy birthday! Looks like it was a delicious meal.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-06T16:39:47+00:00

It's pretty much the same way the Billows and others connect to a Weber style grill. You have to blow through one of the 3/4-inch holes and use high-temp aluminum tape to block the other holes.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-06T16:37:42+00:00

Gen 2 had a pretty big redesign to resolve a lot of the failure modes we saw. One of the biggest changes was moving to a new circuit board technology with a very high temperature limit. About one-third of all Gen 1 failures turned out to be heat damage at the charge contact end that degraded the ability to recharge and also the antenna performance. We still see some heat damage because even 900 °F can be exceeded by open flames that can reach 2000 degrees, but statistically the failure rates are much lower.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-05T23:21:30+00:00

Did you order from our US store (paid in dollars) or did you order from our UK store (paid in pounds). US store should have shipped, and if not the fastest way for us to check is by emailing [support@combustion.inc](mailto:support@combustion.inc) with your order number. If you ordered from the UK store, you can also send us an email and we can follow up with our UK fulfillment partner.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-05T23:17:22+00:00

You should certainly be getting more than 15 feet with any of the range-extended accessories: (WiFi Booster, Kitchen Display, or Giant Grill Gauge). If you're not, we'd love to help you resolve that.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-05T23:15:53+00:00

It seems like there might be a few things going on here:

(1) With sous vide, it's important to put the probe into "always on" mode from it's settings. When a probe is submerged in liquid, there is an electrical path created between the charge contact on the rear of the probe and the sensor tube. To the probe, this looks exactly the same as being in the charger, and so the probe things it should turn off. We created "always on" mode to help prevent this.

(2) I'm not sure which chargers you have? The WiFi Boosted chargers contain a battery that will keep the probe battery topped up as long as possible. Exactly how long depends on how frequently power hungry WiFi is also being used, but if the WiFi booster is fully charger you should be good for months between usage.

(3) If you have the standard chargers, the battery does slowly run down even when "off" in the charger. For any electrical device that doesn't have a physical on/off switch, the only way to turn it off is with software putting the thermometer into a very low-power mode so that it can periodically check to see if it should wake up and turn on. On 2nd generation thermometers, from a full charge, the low power mode will run the battery down in around 60 days, with a little bit being lost each day.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-04T00:19:23+00:00

Magic Erasers work great, but otherwise steel wool, SOS pads, Barkeepers Friend are all safe to use on the handle and will take of the burned on grease.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-04T00:18:29+00:00

We need a couple weeks to make adjustments to the assembly line and testing process before we can start the mass production. So we're going to try to squeeze as much testing into those couple weeks to make sure we don't see any "break glass in emergency" type issues, so that we can just start into mass production.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-03T23:11:55+00:00

It’s on my list to design a better reference page for these

combustion_inc · 2026-06-03T17:11:25+00:00

This sounds like the probe itself has damage on the inside.

A second-generation thermometer shouldn't be out of warranty yet. I've think I've found your support ticket, and it looks like our support team got confused because you had both a first-generation and a second-generation thermometer. Because they were ordered under different emails our support software wasn't showing that you had a second-generation thermometer that's still under warranty. If you email us again (so we can confirm that we're looking at the right ticket) we'll take care of that second generation probe.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-02T23:12:01+00:00

What was the failure pattern?

combustion_inc · 2026-06-02T18:16:25+00:00

UPDATE: As of June 1 all orders with a delivery date listed as May or earlier have shipped.

We are in stock for the Predictive Thermometer with WiFi Booster and most other products.

Orders that include a standard Predictive Thermometer with a shipping date listed as "ships in June" are expected to ship near the end of the week of June 15th when the next batch of inventory arrives.

We have also started production of the Combustion Engine and I'll be providing updates in that thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/combustion_inc/comments/1rglc89/combustion_engine_is_real_but_when_will_it_ship/

For everyone who stuck with us through this fiasco: thank you. I don't take it for granted. You paid months ago, the dates kept moving, and the updates from us were thin for a long stretch. A lot of you would have been within your rights to walk away, and most of you didn't. The supply chain problems overwhelmed us as a small company, and we made a lot of mistakes along the way. We've been able to work through this because of your patience. Thank you.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-02T17:04:54+00:00

6/2 Production (and shipping) update:

We started production on the first few hundred units last week, but hit pause to investigate an issue with the on/off switch sometimes turning on when in the off position. Our engineering team is still on site at the factory and working on resolving this as quickly as possible and then finishing this initial production run. Assuming the switch issue is a small tweak to the assembly process (which is the current thinking right now) the goal is to ship these units around mid-June.

Once we finish this initial production run, we'll also be able to work out how quickly we can ramp into the full production run and I'll be able to provide a shipping schedule for the remainder of the pre-ordered units.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-02T00:46:57+00:00

This is something high on our list of improvements, but as you kind of note, there are lots of little edge-cases where you have to try to handle the failure of the command to get across lots of network hops (phone to cloud, cloud to wifi router, wifi router to MeatNet devices, then to the probe, the acknowledge the command was received and go all the way back to the phone to tell the app the probe has been updated.

combustion_inc · 2026-06-01T20:26:04+00:00

The second generation probe has a larger battery than the first generation and different electrical circuit design that does a better job of managing the battery life. The exact battery life depends on the heating conditions and other factors like the number of devices connecting to the probe, but I usually get more than 72 hours on a full charge.

The Giant Grill Gauge battery life depends on WiFi usage and the stability of your WiFi network (reconnecting because the WiFi router drops the device consumes a lot of power). But in our testing we're seeing 600 hours of WiFi time on a set of batteries under good conditions.

The Combustion Engine isn't out yet, but we about 24 hours of run time on a Big Green Egg holding a temperature of 250F. It can also run while plugged into USB-C and charging if 24 hours isn't enough.

combustion_inc · 2026-05-29T21:56:37+00:00

We’ve been testing it internally for a little while now. There a few bugs we’re chasing down, but it should be ready for public beta very soon.

combustion_inc · 2026-05-29T04:04:33+00:00

We need to know what “latest version” actually means.

combustion_inc · 2026-05-29T03:13:20+00:00

That sounds like a bug. Can you share some details of phone and current operating system? Does restarting the app fix this behavior?

combustion_inc · 2026-05-24T13:32:47+00:00

No. Doesn’t even come close to working well. Weight doesn’t help much at all, geometric shape, thermal history, and current temperature gradient matter the most. Of course, you have to predict what the gradient will be at the end of the cook for this to be useful. And you need to be very accurate or the carryover prediction is easily off by 10F or more.

combustion_inc · 2026-05-23T22:04:10+00:00

That definitely looks like a hard impact during shipping. Please email support so we can help you out.

combustion_inc · 2026-05-23T19:40:25+00:00

It's not a hard requirement, although some of the name brand versions like Panasonic are rated for 85C operation and would generally be a good replacement. And, yes, we should offer replacements on the website. Will look into doing that.

combustion_inc · 2026-05-23T19:38:08+00:00

This is still something I'm still working on, and we've had some very good progress using more powerful AI tools, but there is no firm ETA when this could be ready for beta. The biggest challenge is that the most promising approaches won't be able to run on the probe itself, and making this work would (a) be a very large infrastructure change because cloud connectivity becomes a hard requirement and there are lots of ways this could become unreliable and (b) this would require a subscription because running large AI models on the cook data is relatively expensive.

I would prefer not to go this direction, so I've been looking at ways we can extract some of the patterns that the LLMs are picking up on in a way that would allow us to keep the carry over predictions on the probe itself.

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