Earlier this week, an indoor/outdoor thermometer that had supplied the daily highs and lows for more than 30 years finally gave it up. It was so old (HOW OLD WAS IT?) …
… It was so old that the outdoor sensor was on a 15-foot wire. Today, it’s all wireless – and been wireless for years. The thermometer package did two basic things: It showed the current outside/inside temperature, and it kept the “all time record” high and low in memory (with “all time” meaning since the battery was replaced or the memory reset).
It cost about $25 in the mid-1980s when purchased at a Radio Shack store. That would be about $60 in today’s currency. Radio Shack was once the nation’s go-to electronics store in its glory years of the 1980s and 1990s when it labeled itself “The Technology Store.” But its brick-and-mortar stores couldn’t compete with the big-box electronic competition and the internet.
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Today’s indoor/outdoor thermometers aren’t like the ones of Radio Shack’s yesteryear. Amazon offers a variety of them, from as simple as only in/out temps to a weather station that can turn its owner into the neighborhood meteorologist.
But my needs are simple. I found what I needed on Amazon, and for about $25 – the same price as the old one purchased in the mid-1980s. Put another way, the new one cost about half of what the old one did back then, adjusting for inflation.
The ThermoPro TP-62 not only displays in/out temps, but the humidity for both locations as well. Although the size of the old and new units is the same (about the size of a deck of playing cards), the numbers on the display are about twice the height of the old unit.
That makes the numbers easier to read – but in addition, a touch on the case’s top provides an orange/yellow backlight for 10 seconds. Another plus over the old unit.
Both old and new thermometers had an “all-time record” temperature feature, but the ThermoPro can be set to show the all-time or the 24-hour record high and low temperatures for the day.
And finally, the ThermoPro is unleashed from the old-fashioned wired outdoor sensor that limited the distance from the display. The outdoor sensor range, according to company literature, is about 200 feet.
There’s not much to get sentimental about when it comes to an indoor/outdoor thermometer. The fact that it was on the job since the start of Ronald Reagan’s second presidential term is saying something – given the lifespan of much of today’s electronics. And it even outlasted the once-mammoth chain that sold it. Radio Shack filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and again in 2017. It has an online presence at www.radioshack.com.
Time (and temperature) marches on.
Lonnie Brown can be reached at LedgerDatabase@aol.com.
