Every leave-in thermometer solves the same basic problem: you cannot stand at the smoker for twelve hours. What separates them is how much they get in the way while doing it.
The traditional answer is a probe on a braided cable, run out through the lid or a grommet to a base unit sitting on a table. It works, it is cheap, and it has two persistent annoyances — the cable is a heat leak wherever it crosses the seal, and cables fail. They get trodden on, crimped in a door, or cooked against a hot edge, and when one goes you find out at the worst possible moment.
The MEATER Plus removes the cable entirely, and in doing so removes both problems at once.
The dual-sensor design is the real feature
The wireless part gets the attention. The part that actually matters on brisket is that a single probe carries two sensors: one at the tip reading the internal temperature of the meat, and one at the exposed end reading the ambient air at the grate.
Those are the two numbers a brisket cook needs, and they answer different questions. The internal tells you where the meat is in its journey. The ambient tells you whether your fire is still behaving — and the ambient is the one that saves cooks, because a pit that has quietly fallen to 180°F at 3am is a problem you want to hear about at 3am.
It also matters where the ambient is read. The lid thermometer on almost every smoker sits at the top of the dome, several inches above and away from the meat, and on an offset it can be reading thirty or forty degrees off from what the brisket is actually experiencing. A probe reading the air an inch from the meat is reading the truth.
What no cable buys you
On a kettle or an offset, not much beyond convenience. On a kamado or a well-gasketed cabinet, quite a lot: those cookers hold temperature by sealing, and a probe wire crushed in the gasket is a permanent unmetered air leak for the entire cook.
There is a second, quieter benefit. Wrapping is where cabled probes most often get pulled out, because you are lifting fifteen pounds of hot meat onto paper while a wire tethers it to a table. With nothing attached, the wrap is a two-handed job with no third thing to think about. Anyone who has torn a probe out mid-wrap will recognize the value.
The range limitation, honestly
This is the complaint you will find in every discussion of MEATER products, and it is substantially fair. The stated figure of up to 165 feet is a line-of-sight number with the charging-block repeater in play. Through the walls of a house it will be less, sometimes a good deal less.
In practice this is manageable rather than fatal. The charging block relays, so positioning it between the smoker and where you will be — a kitchen windowsill, a garage shelf — solves most cases. Leaving an old phone near the block running the app extends things further.
But it is a real constraint and it should decide your purchase. If your smoker is at the far end of a long garden and you intend to sleep at the other end of a brick house, a Wi-Fi thermometer that talks to your router is a better tool for that job, and our thermometer hub covers those.
One probe, one brisket
The other genuine limitation. Each unit holds one probe, so a second packer means a second unit — and by the time you have bought two, a wired four-probe system costs less and gives you more channels.
If you regularly cook two briskets at once, that maths goes against MEATER quickly, and we would point you at a multi-probe unit instead. For a single packer, which is what most people cook, one probe is one probe and nothing is lost.
Who should buy it
Someone cooking a single brisket, on a cooker where the door seal matters, who wants meat and grate temperature from one device and does not want to think about cables again. For that person the MEATER Plus is a straightforwardly good purchase.
Someone cooking for a crowd on two packers, or monitoring from a long way away, should look at wired multi-probe or Wi-Fi units instead — and should pair whatever they choose with a fast instant-read for the end of the cook. No leave-in probe, wireless or otherwise, can tell you whether the whole brisket is tender.