Thanks for these tips. Wish I had seen these before my last smoke as mine got torched.
Got this smoker for Christmas from the wife, and have done a handful of cooks with it. Have had similar temperature control issues with it from the beginning, which were more obvious after I got the
Thermoworks Signals and have been monitoring the temperature at the meat racks. I suffered from both a large differential from set point (50 degrees in some cases) and large temp swings (30-50 degrees wide), making cooking harder than needed. I know it's an analog controller, but this seems a little much.
All that said, the worst part came during the last cook, which was a 19lb brisket, my third brisket in this cooker. Cooked along fine albeit with the temp dial tweaking that is often needed... Got to the stall, wrapped, etc. and we were about 190-195 probe temps and about to decide to pull it when the signals read the pit temp at over 500 degrees.
I was able to safely enough open the door and yank out the meat, at which point I saw that a grease fire has started. The grease from a small tear in the brisket allowed a stream of grease to fall onto edge where the metal vents on the grease pan are, and down into the firebox itself where it ignited. I quickly closed the door and turned off the smoker. Realizing the cool-down procedure was still pumping air into the box, I unplugged it and allowed it to burn out, which it did over a few minutes. Thankfully nobody got hurt.
I think the grease pan and grease management of this smoker is a faulty design. The racks allow food to be placed in areas that aren't set up to catch the grease. I have put hours into trying to clean this thing out and it still smells. Have had to go the oven/grill cleaner route and bascially sand off the char with steel wool as none of my normal citrus-based cleaning stuff would touch it.
Dansons is replacing the RTD probe to try to help with the temp swings and sending me a new flame tamer as the paint on the old one burnt up in the grease, but I am a little concerned about the way this design works overall. Perhaps the full aluminum pan with water will give more coverage. If others have thoughts I'd love to hear them.