Just called Traeger and the first guy told me it was normal. Then I spoke to a manager who told me the start up procedure in the book is wrong. You should leave the lid closed set it to whatever temp you want and when it gets to temp put your food on. I hope this works but I'm not optimistic.
They told me the same thing, so I did that today testing it and it hasn't made a difference.
So before loading it up and trucking it back to Cabelas I decided to experiment a little more.
The discrepancy with the probes was easy to figure out: my probes were on the cooking grate, the Traeger probe sits much higher. I put the upper grate in the grill, put my probe on that, right next to the Traeger probe, and they read the same, + or - 1 degree. So I moved the probe back to the cooking grate and have been watching it for 2 hours. It's consistently 25 degrees below the Traeger probe. So, my cooking surface spends most of the time under 200 degrees when set at 225.
Second, the grill can't hold a temp for more than 5 minutes. It constantly cycles between low of about 180 (on the Traeger probe) and a high of 265 (Traeger probe). It rarely ever went to 225 at the cooking grate on the 225 setting, spent most of the time in the 190-205 range, but did swing from 165 to at a low, to 235 on the high, but never held that high temp more than a few minutes. Is this cycling just the normal operation of pellet grills? Do they try to average 225 over a cook, or maintain it? What I've seen is this unit cannot maintain a temp at all. It will shoot up when the unit detects the temp is low, then rapidly drop off. Seems like it drops 7-8 degrees a minute once the temp starts to fall and by the time the grill recovers, it's down at or below 170 on the cooking grate. This happens 5-7 times an hour, is that just how pellet grills cook?
