I was using the maverick et732 and I also tried my I grill thermometer as well. I had the probes towards the back of the grill and the food in the front. the food wasn't to close to the probes. I was using the cowboy lump coal. I am using the stone as well. I did notice that there were some big pieces of lump should I break them up in smaller pieces. I did buy a bag of royal oak to try. I don't have to many choices of lump charcoal to buy here in PA. Thanks any help would be appreciated.
Leave the big chunks, the smaller pieces might fall through your grate. Also, the bigger chunks allow more air to flow between them. I'm not sure how much fuel you load up with but here's how I load mine. This load did 2 pork butts (overnight) and then 3 racks of ribs went on the next morning when the pork came off. The lump comes up to right below the stone. Actually that load lifted the stone slightly at the top of the picture.
I cleaned the center circle of those small pieces before lighting that piece of starter cube you can see at the top of that circle. It's about 1/3 of one of the cubes. I open all my vents, light the cube and leave the lid up also. I give the cube roughly 5 minutes to burn out (or if I look and it burned completely before 5 minutes is up) and close the lid.
I'll set my top vent to the below picture:
And my bottom vent to this:
By the time I've got my food situated that will be going on and run my probes I will be using to chart the cook, the smoker is usually between 200 and 220. I'll go ahead and put the food on. It will usually settle into about 230 with those settings. It varies a little but never by more that 10 degrees.
On your next cook, try a circle of fuel with the center empty for air flow. Light it in one spot only, and start small on your settings. Opening the top more will help increase the temperature to a point, then you will need to allow more air to flow to the fire so it will get bigger. I pretty much keep the top and bottom set about the same amount of air flow.
Any adjustments you make give it adequate time to settle in, 20-30 minutes before changing anything else. On kamado style cookers, it's slow to recover from overshooting your temperature.
I'm having the opposite problem in my
Akorn. I am using frontier lump and it gets too hot.
I did notice that after 4 hours it hums along at 230 nice and steady.
You're on the opposite side. Too much fire to begin with. I'm sure you've seen how long this cooker takes to cool down so you can put the cover back on. Start with only 1/3 of the fire you're starting with and see how that does.
The PID controller can help keep it at temperature, but I would not use it to get up to temperature. Most of them get too big of a fire going in the beginning and then it takes you hours in this cooker to bring the temperature down as you've seen.