Tested: Inkbird IBS-TH1 Thermometer | Simple and efficient

The Inkbird IBS-TH1 Bluetooth Thermometer is a simple and inexpensive device that proves to be reliable and has a very practical mobile application. Without being perfect, this is a good little well thought out gadget.

Karim Benessaieh
The Press

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There are dozens of connected thermometer models, capable of sending the detected temperature to your phone via Bluetooth or WiFi. However, it is difficult to judge their quality without having tried them. That’s what we’ve been doing since mid-May with an affordable model, the Inkbird IBS-TH1, a Bluetooth thermometer with a probe that can be placed in a pool, aquarium or cellar.

You can add a gateway, the IBS-M1, which allows it to connect to the Internet and therefore send information to your phone, wherever you are. However, it costs more than the thermometer, at $48.99, a purchase that we didn’t really think was essential.

The Inkbird IBS-TH1 is a small magnetic washer 5 cm in diameter, in which you slide an AAA battery and which can be installed on a metal plate. A socket on the top allows you to add a probe to it at the end of a 1.5 m cable.

Once the battery is installed, simply download the app England, available for iOS and Android, and add our thermometer placed near the phone or tablet. The operation went off without a hitch twice in our case.

We then have in the app the temperature detected by the probe and, as a bonus, the humidity level. The battery charge percentage is displayed at the very top. Inkbird assures that its duration is one year. In our test, the battery lost 9 percentage points of its charge in 15 days, from 79 to 70%, which would mathematically give us 166 days. A lithium battery would maybe reach a year.

In the settings, you can choose how often the thermometer will take the temperature, from 10 seconds to 120 minutes. If you notice that the temperature detected does not conform to that of another thermometer, it is possible to perform a “calibration”, by adding or subtracting a certain number of degrees. This is what we did when we found that the Inkbird IBS-TH1 gave us 2 degrees Fahrenheit too much. You can choose the units in Fahrenheit or Celsius, and 13 languages, including French, are offered.

Finally, in the third tab of the application, there are graphs showing the temperatures recorded over a day, a week, a month or a year.

The range of the Bluetooth transmitter is about thirty meters. During our two weeks of testing, the thermometer always connected to the phone when opening the app, but sometimes we had to wait a few tens of seconds. The temperatures recorded (and corrected by 2 degrees) were correct, a second classic thermometer allowing us to be sure. In fact, we got unlikely temperatures on two occasions, but that was because the probe had been taken out of the pool.

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No way to find the instruction manual on the Inkbird site. For the calibration, for example, we had to go at random by typing “-2” in front of the temperature, which ended up working.

The Bluetooth connection of this thermometer is intriguing. It does not appear in the Bluetooth menu and the connection is made without any pairing request. In other words, anyone could connect to it if they are nearby. One can imagine the confusion if neighbors have this same model.

One buys ?

We cannot swear that this thermometer will work for many years, but it has passed the reliability test. Considering its price, the purchase is to be recommended.