What you said above is essentially my plan.
Below is IMHO
I believe the
Masterbuilt engineers had the 40" basic design correct for smoking at 220-275º, too many watts = more BTUs thus higher cooking temp so with normal heat loss the 750w elements do fine. That is until the door is opened, and not so good during initial ramp up to set temp.
750 watts puts out 2560 BTUs of heat. The approx. amount of BTUs to hold the 40" MES at 50º outside ambient is about 2000 BTUs. The extra 22% of BTUs the at 750watts just isn't enough to overcome door openings below 70º outside ambients and the same for ramp up to set temp.
Of course MES owners complained about lousy ramp to set temp and poor temp recovery when door is open, and
Masterbuilt upped the watts. But I have found that once all the metal is thoroughly heated (preheat) that recovery is actually fairly quick. Anyway
Masterbuilt sticks a 1200 watt element that puts out nearly 4100 BTUs of heat. So whenever that element is on it is cooking a lot hotter than the old 750 watt element. Whatever is closest to that element is NOT going to cook at same rate as the upper grates because there is a heck of a lot of extra heat. Personally I think
Masterbuilt did a bit of overkill on the extra wattage, they should have modified the controller to allow temps up 325 to cook and crisp up chicken, the new 1200 watt elements can easily achieve that temp and higher.
I want to avoid cooking the meat at higher temps..
Solution...
Two stage heating.
Primary stage is my 750 watt element which will handle main cooking duty.
Secondary element 300-400 watts, that will only kick on if the MES internal temp drops -15-20º from set temp, and will cycle off when internal temp returns to within -5º of set temp. The primary can easily get the MES up another 5 deg.
I'm looking for a PID controller than can handle the logic of a set point with multiple triggers and control twin circuits. Of course the price will have to be reasonable. If I can't find such a controller, then I will simply put the secondary on a seperate circuit with its own PID controller that I would have to manually set below Primary setting.
