Jed, seriously:
If you say, Rossis thermomeasurements are fine, does this mean that you
dont see the possibility for easy and cheap improvements?
All points that are discussed here can be eliminated by better
thermoelement placement almost without efforts and costs.
If somebody does not admit this, then he must be a blind mouse.
Rossi has chossen an arrangement that is complicated to verify and to
analyse. A little bit more worse, and it would not deliver any
reasonable results. So he has choosen the most worse and doubtful
placement that was possible.
Your experiments will not change anything about this fact.
Peter