Who can’t use a decent thermocouple-type thermometer? They’re perfect when you’re troubleshooting a baking oven or gauging the health of an air conditioner or heat pump. You can buy a quality, engineering/industrial-class instrument from a recognized name like Fluke or, for 1/10th the price, pick up this “Fluke-oid” thermometer from the PETSTIBLE Store. Sounds like a super deal, right? I certainly thought so, and I was really excited to receive it. Pull up a chair, I’ll share my experience, and you can draw your own conclusions.Like similar Fluke models, this instrument purports to be a “dual channel” K-type thermocouple thermometer. The seller claims this is a “high accuracy” instrument. It comes with two exposed-bead thermocouple probes and two “pipe clamp sensors.”I’ll say this much: The product successfully mimics the Fluke design aesthetic—dark-colored plastic instrument case floating in a yellow-ish rubber bumper guard. Were you to catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of your eye, you might be forgiven for having believed you’d seen a real Fluke. Unfortunately, that’s as close as this product ever gets to being that good, and for me, the experience went steadily downhill.The first thing I noticed when unpackaging the instrument is the decidedly lightweight and cheap feel to it. I tried not to judge a book by its cover. I attempted to install a battery. The battery door is normally held in place with a screw which, on my unit, was not only missing but, given the absence of thread marks, had never been installed. This screw, by the way, doesn’t just “secure” the battery compartment. With it missing, the battery door literally falls off. Wonderful...I turned the unit on and plugged in one of the thermocouple probes. It didn’t work, no conductivity. It was dead right out of the box. Strike 2.I plugged the 2nd probe in. It worked... for about 2 minutes. After that, the simple action of manipulating the cable appears to have broken it. Strike 3.I attempted to fix the first probe by removing the screws from the connector shell. The self-tapping screws were stripped. Either they were over-torqued at the factory or the connector shell material is so crummy that it can’t hold a screw. Given the apparent quality of the connector overall, my guess is the latter.I inspected the welded thermocouple beads on the ends of the probes. One was welded and twisted. The other was simply welded with no twist. The bead with no twist was broken. Now, whether the twist should be there or not is not my issue. The issue is that two identical assemblies, shipped in the same box, yet fabricated in two different ways, suggests that workers at the manufacturing plant aren’t following a consistent fabrication process.The clamp-on thermocouples both functioned, more or less, but when I moved either one of them from the T1 to T2 position, the reported temperature suddenly changed by 2 degrees C. Consider: At a nominally 30-degree C room temperature, the difference between the two channels represents nearly 7% of deviation! That’s what PETSTIBLE call “high accuracy?”I noticed that the thermocouple plugs don’t fit in the jacks nicely, and when inserted, lean to one side or another, instead of seating fully and standing perpendicular to the deck. I opened the case to see if I could discern what (besides cheap connectors) might be responsible for this.To open the case, I had to pull off a calibration sticker on the side of the instrument. The sticker seals a hole normally used by a metrologist to manipulate a calibration pot or press an internal button to force the instrument into calibration mode. The funny thing is, once the case was open, I saw no evidence of anything inside that would justify the calibration hole.If I had paid the 50-buck retail price for this direct-to-dumpster merchandise, I’d be pretty steamed. I’d box it up and ship this right back where it came from. Unfortunately, as I acquired this sample through the Vine program, I can’t return it... meaning that I will have to pay income tax on a $50-dollar item that, as we speak, has already been resigned to the trash can.