Unfortunately, you misinterpreted the instructions. You max it for 30 minutes to burn off any manufacturing debris, then let it cool back to ambient air temp. After the cool down, I do a wipe down with a dry, clean cloth. Now you're ready to start cooking on it.
You tried to combine the "burn off" and "first cook" all at the same time. Clearly that didn't work to well.
As TallBM suggested, get an A-Maze-N and save yourself a lot of heartburn. As a bonus you'll get better consistency in your smoke without having to add chips every 30-40 minutes.
Agreed that the "burn off" and "first cook" shouldn't be combined. But I'm not sure that the manual was misinterpreted about maxing it out before each cook. I just got the 20070910, my manual states:
Page 4:
"LET'S GET STARTED!
- “Pre-season” smoker prior to first use. See page 23.
- Pre-heat smoker for 30 to 45 minutes at max temperature before loading food."
And page 23 says, for the pre-season instructions:
"PRE-SEASON SMOKER PRIOR TO FIRST USE.
Some smoke may appear during this time, this is normal.
1. Make sure water pan is in place with NO WATER.
2. Set temperature to 275°F (135°C) and run unit for 3 hours.
......"
As I read it, it does seem to me like they've shown separate instructions for pre-seasoning, and for food. And they are telling you to max it out for 30-45 minutes each time before cooking. That seems a bit odd to me, any theories as to why they'd want you to crank it up every time? Maybe to help get the wood chips going?
I got an
AMNPS for my smoker, so I will probably skip the max-out before each cook. ad69iuu, I'm impressed with the
AMNPS "so far" (today is my first smoker use :) ). But it's been making thin blue smoke for about 4 hours, hands-off. It's used about 1/3 of the pellets that the
AMNPS can hold, so 10+ hours should be doable without any baby-sitting.