Infrared Thermometers?

With a new pit, I think something like this would be great to help you check the temp at grate level throughout the pit. For $17, I'd do it.

i build infared cameras. based on that I would say you wouldn't get good readings. its only going to read the outside of your firebox, which can be greatly effected by the external weather conditions

I've got one but i use it for tune up work on my Corvette. It's easy to see variations of temps on the headers and see if a plug is not firing correctly.

I was given one as a Christmas present a couple years back. It's great for say, checking the temp of your pizza stone. But for barbecue it's pretty much useless

Had a meat inspector use one at a comp last year. Seemed a bit extreme.

i would think your best bet would be to hang a thermocouple in the opening between the firebox and cooking chamber. This will tell you what the heat is going into the cooking area. Seems like that would correlate more closely to how your fire is doing than the outside of the fire box.

Fuel dimissions, fire lociation, paint/rust conditions, outside weather, those are all going to factor into your outside firebox point temp

I have this one, and use it mainly to check my pizza stone. It is definitely not necessary, but if you like gadgets, and have the money to spend on it, it's pretty cool.

I've found that the accuracy of IR thermometers are greatly affected by air flow around the surface that you are monitoring. They can also be affected by the presence of steam and I imagine that real smoky conditions might give the same result.

Like others have mentioned, there are probably too many variables involved to be able to consistently correlate the outside temp of your smoker/firebox to the inside temp.

They're fun little gadgets but once you get to know the dynamics of your cooker you're rarely use it again.

I agree with Carbon.
Especially with an uninsulated metal-wall cooker they can give you a real good idea about heat flow and hot spots under various operating conditions.
However, by the time you've got your pit built enough so that you can test the temp distribution, it might be too late to do much with the information.

IR thermometers provide a surface temperature measurement. Personally, I don't find them much use at all. They are extremely accurate when calibrated. One problem is that the emissivity of the surface you're looking at might not be close to the emissivity of what is programmed into the thermometer and you may not be able to change this, so the comparisons and resulting readings can be significantly different from the actual surface temperature. Another factor is that the radiation that arrives at the thermometer is not only due to the surface temperature, but also due to the reflection of IR radiation from other objects. For instance, if you measure the temperature of your patio deck with a clear sky, you will get a different temperature when a cloud rolls by (not blocking the sun) even if the temperature of the patio itself does not change. At work we are considered too stupid to operate the thermostats in our offices, so in the winter my office is at about 60 degrees. I'm bundled up in a jacket and have a space heater going. The thermometer on my desk says it's 60*, but management sends some idiot with an IR thermometer out. He measures the walls and desk and gets a reading of 72*. He admits that it feels awfully cold in the office for it to be 72*, but insists that it must be correct because it is a very expensive thermometer. When I explain to him about calibrations and emissivities and that the temperature he measures with his toy also is affected by the very large window, he insists that it is correct and that he is unable to increase the temperature in my office because it is 72*, and that he doesn't want to argue any more because his fingers are getting numb. Again, very accurate and precise when calibrated, but usually these are not calibrated properly.

The more you cook , the less you use a therm