I love the idea.... you could just splice/resolder wire to acess remotely for controll in the house. You could set up a camera to view the cooker, but it would have to be a bad muther of a camera to deal with MN winter, more so if it will freeze/thaw so much when it's close to the Egg. You could check out durrable surveylance cameras and work that out. I'm gonna chew on that, I love the idea. It's not worth doing at my house.... maybe.... but the idea is choice! Thermocouples you can't just "extend", but perhaps for some $ they would send me ones with the right response or let me know how to mod-them. Hell, I'd keep the controller in the basement and only use the PC. As long as you have calibration parameters, you can make thermocouples as long as you need them to be, no? That is my thought. Obviously within reason considering it isn't like they are high voltage. In one of my labs, we made our own out of 2 pieces of the right kind of wire. We also discussed the principles that allow them to work. IIRC, as long as the voltage drop is calibrated to the correct temps, it'll work. And generically with any wire they are linear right? ie I could extend them and recalibrate myself? if extended with generic wire, would you even need to recalibrate? both sides of the generic wire would experience the same electron transfer rates so the calibration would still be right? maybe?