Rather than the strictly on/off smoke detector you have for your house, this one sits inside your oven and allows you to set the tolerance using a set of pre-defined cooking routines e.g. "roast","pizza","macaroni cheese" so it knows at what stage for each meal it should alert the user to the impending doom/perfectly cooked meal. The alarm comes with a series of "smoke tones", so you don't have your ears blasted off (unless you want to) when you're just pushing the limits of gastronomy. The alarm is deactivated when it notices fresh air again (i.e. when you check on the item by opening the oven door, at which points it ratchets up is activation limit a futher 20%).-- neilp, Aug 23 2004 Wireless Doneness Sensor http://www.costco.c...49&hierPath=89*749* [jurist, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004] I like the idea, but is there an "I haven't cleaned my oven since 1983" setting?-- Fishrat, Aug 23 2004 yup, there's obviously a "smoke baseline" feature to assess ambient smokiness.-- neilp, Aug 23 2004 All in all, I think I'd prefer the standard wireless oven thermometer with doneness sensor, either built-in or auxilliary, as described in the link. I'm especially impressed that this particular model has four doneness alarms: almost done, done, overdone, and out of range. The "overdone" alarm, however, might more appropriately be called the "throw out and start over" advisor. The "out-of-range" alert is either to remind you that the local pub may be more than 100 feet from your oven, or to warn you that someone else just took your meal out of the range and is about to eat your dinner.-- jurist, Aug 23 2004 but, but.. that only works with meat. Not Pizza and the other food groups.-- neilp, Aug 23 2004 Is pizza a whole food group now? Excellent four pentagonal meals a day, just what I've been waiting for.-- etherman, Aug 23 2004 Neilp, great minds (or mimes) think alike! I was just about to posit the very same idea and figured I'd better check first. Brilliant!-- FrostedFlake, Dec 08 2005 random, halfbakery