Invest in a Maverick to monitor your cooker and food temps and if in the budget, get yourself and
Thermapen. I invested in both this past spring and one of the best purchases I made so far. I now have the wife trained to use the
Thermapen when she cooks in the oven!
I'd definitely go with a Maverick as it eliminates all kinds of "guess work". The chamber probe will tell you exactly what your grate temp is, and the meat probe will tell you what the internal temp of the meat is. On top of that, you don't have to open a door / remove a lid to check either. Even better, you don't even have to walk outside.
In short, temp probes like the Maverick's are game changers.
Smokeordie,
with all that said, it's not absolutely necessary to get a Maverick. Once you know about the temp variations in your smoker, you just kind of wing it so to speak. For example, if the dome temp reads 260, the top grate might actually be at 230. That's fine. Only thing that will really be affected is your time estimates. Once you know of this difference, you adjust for it. It's kind of like when you set your clock ahead by 5 mins, but then you mentally adjust the time to account for it.
Another thing is to learn the characteristics of your smoker and what might lead to temp variations. For example, an ECB has a big water bowl that takes a while to heat up if filled with cool water. So, at the outset, the rack right above the water bowl will probably have lower temps than the top rack does. As the water warms up, that temp difference will decrease. If you use sand in the water bowl, temps even out more.
If your current temp gauge is removable, I'd wait til you had a consistent temp reading in the dome, record it, then remove the gauge, quickly open smoker and put gauge on top shelf, let smoker recover and record that temp. Repeat with lower shelf. Won't be 100% accurate of course, but will give you a pretty good idea about overall variations.
