And here it is! The packaging is very good looking, a cylinger about 5" in diameter and 25" long with a yellow cap and black body emblazoned with their logo. Once you twist off the cap you'll find the circulator nestled in the package with some foam rings and caps. Everything about the packaging seems to be well thought out and should provide a great deal of protection for the circulator when I'm taking it on the road with me.
Here is everything removed from the packaging. The circulator is quite a bit larger than my Nomiku but looks good and has a really nice, bright, large display. There is no manual included in the box so I highly suggest downloading it from the Anova Culinary website. The controls are somewhat intuitive but there are a few things that may not be so obvious, such as how to switch from farenheit to celcius. The clamp attaches to the cooking vessel and allows you to easily adjust the height of the circulator so you can use smaller pots. There are minimum and maximum water levels marked on the stainless steel sleeve of the circulator, however I did see some issues with the measurement of temperature when running towards the minimum water level mark.
Here is the circulator mounted to a 12 quart Cambro. If you look closely you can see the MAX water level mark, there is also a small indentation in the stainless steel sleeve at this level. In the picture to the left I had filled the Cambro to the 8 quart (7.57 liter) mark with cold tap water, normally I would fill the bath with hot tap water but I wanted to see how quickly the new Anova would heat it up. First I filled the container to the 8 quart mark and attached my Nomiku to see how much it would heat the bath in 15 minutes, then I dumped the container, refilled it with cold tap water to the 8 quart mark and put on the Anova which brough the water level to just a few inches above the MIN mark on the sleeve. This is were I noticed something odd, when started the temperature display on the Anova started going up considerably faster than the Nomiku's had. When I touched the power button to turn off the circulator the temperature reading dropped quickly. A temperature probe confirmed that the reading on the Anova was high during the heating phase, but once the set point was reached the reading was spot on. This only happened when the water level was near the MIN mark on the sleeve, when I filled the Cambro up to the 10 liter mark the temperature display on the circulator and on my probe thermometer stayed in sync. As a final test I fulled up the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (15.5C), attached the Anova Precision Cooker and set it for a 60C bath. On an uncovered polycarbonate container it took 63 minutes to heat the bath up to the set point. This is on par with other circulators I've used and is why we always want to start by filling our baths with hot tap water. My first impressions of the Anova Precision Cooker is that it looks great, is quiet and easy to use. I have not had a chance to play around with the Bluetooth connectivity since the Android app has not been released yet, I may have to dig up my old iPhone just so I can play around with the feature until an app for my phone is released.
