Abstract: An appliance temperature sensor for acquisition of usable data in a noisy environment collects a plurality of temperature readings in a buffer. It then screens that batch of data to determine whether or not its noise content is acceptably low before forwarding the data to a memory for use in subsequent appliance operations. Screening consists of computing the arithmetic mean and the variance of the readings of the batch at hand. If the variance is less than a predetermined threshold level, the mean of that batch of temperature data is forwarded to the memory for subsequent use. If the variance exceeds that predetermined threshold level, the data are expunged and not used. When the number of rejected contiguous batches of data exceeds a predetermined number, an alarm is provided to alert an operator that the system is noisy.