Bought a new Weber Smokey Mountain smoker last Oct. and lately have started to notice my smoked meats were cooking faster than expected, even though I was keeping the internal box temp. within a desired cooking range. I dropped in another temperature sensor to check the thermometer reading of the kettle cover gauge. I found that the factory installed TI reading was close to 30 degrees lower than check test TI. When I removed the factory TI it was very much covered with a rather heavy coating created from the smoking process. I cleaned the TI sensor and tested it with boiling water, and it read dead on 212*. The coating build up was actually insulating the sensor from the actual box temperature. I guess it's a good practice to clean these TI sensors every quarter if you want to expect fairly accurate readings. Just a tip.
