I had been saving up Amazon gift cards to by an Anova, but this one popped up in my alerts for the very reasonable price of $48 with decent reviews:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id= ... LC-1122587

If I like it and end up using it I may look to upgrade.

Just a heads-up. You need an 8" tall pot for the Anova SV gizmo.

I'm interested in your experience with that cooker... Can you do a review?

Sure! I don't have much to compare it to since I haven't used any other devices, though I did buy my dad the Anova for Christmas, so maybe I can borrow it in the future and compare the two.

As far as the device itself goes, it feels a lot more substantial and higher-quality than I expected for the price. It is quite hefty, and the upper part is a nice soft-textured rubber. It has the ability to change the end cap to point the water output in a different direction if needed.

The clamp worked quite well, I put it in a large stock pot, and they are nice enough to include markings on the device for min & max water levels. I didn't experiment with it, but supposedly if water drops below the min line it will shut off automatically.

The controls are pretty basic. There is a blue thumbwheel that you use to adjust the temperature and time. To set temperature you press the red temperature icon on the left and then find the temp you want in .5 degree increments with the thumbwheel, then press the red temperature icon again, at which point it turns blue. Pressing the red clock icon on the right allows you to set hours, then pressing it again switches to minutes. When you are done, you press the Play button and it turns blue and the device starts doing its thing. It doesn't start counting down the timer until the water reaches the set temperature.

The two times I've used it I've also used a separate instant read thermometer to periodically check the temperature, and so far it has been spot on. The device does a pretty good job at maintaining a constant temperature. Cooking a steak at 130 I briefly saw it spike to 131 for a few seconds once or twice, but for the most part it kept it really close to the set temperature. I havent' seen it spike over 1 degree +/- yet. I'm not sure what the expected accuracy is of it.

According to the instruction manual it does have an option to calibrate the device's thermometer up to +/-9.9 degrees, but I haven't needed to change anything there.

The only issue I ran into is trying to set the timer after you have started it. When first playing around with it, I set it to a temperature and didn't set the timer and pressed 'Go'. After it got up to temperature and seemed to be working as expected, I decided to enter a time. Apparently you can't enter a time when it is running....it looks like it worked, but it doesn't actually start the timer. You need to actually stop the device before you can enter a time for the timer.

All in all I have been very pleased with it at the price ($50) I got it for. I had been wanting an Anova just because of how well it had been reviewed, plus who doesn't like nifty functionality like wifi connectivity, but I work from home, so ultimately something like wifi access to it wouldn't provide too much benefit for me.

I've used it twice so far, once on a 12 oz. ribeye (roughly 2 hours...had issues with the timer as described above), and once on a 4 lb. prime rib (6.5 hours), and both times they were cooked perfectly, and the device chooched along without issue.