I have no experience with this very model but I think it's a great way to go electric. You really have two smokers with this approach since it's easy to go back and forth from electric to charcoal.
This is actually the Brinkmann-recommended conversion from coal to electric. It's a little cheaper on
Amazon buying from the factory:
I think Brinkmann quit selling it a year or so ago (note it says discontinued) so when they're gone they're gone.
And now that Brinkmann is bankrupt, they'll probably be even harder to find. In fact, based on
http://www.brinkmann.net/ you may be wasting your time ordering even on
Amazon.
The manual is still on line:
http://www.brinkmann.net/Docs/Pdf/812-3323-0.pdf
It replaces the charcoal pan and mounts on top of the inner stock legs (no turning them outside!) so there's still about a 1" annular ring of air flow coming in. 1500W is pretty meager for an uninsulated Brinkmann with a lot of airflow. And I seem to recall reading of folks in cold climate never being able to get to 220+ temps with it. But if you stick the whole works in a box (cardboard works fine) you should be fine. (Although you'll have to remove it ever ytime you open the door to add more smoker wood or pellets to the tray.)
There's no controller with it. Brinkmann sized it to run flat out continuously. If extremely stable temps are important to you, you probably want a more powerful filament that cycles on/off with a controller. But as long as your smoker is hotter than your meat and you pull your meat based on a meat thermometer not based on a a clock, who needs all that stable a temp anyway?
If you go this route, you may want to play a bit with raising the smoker tray up to about a 1/4" off the elements if you seem to burn your pellets up to soon (you're not getting optimum smoke that way either.)
Also note these sorts of potted elements don't last forever. I'd store it in a dry garage, not in the damp, and be careful to not touch the element itself with oily skin. (The water pan should keep cooking fats off of it.) If used on a GFCI outlet (outdoor outlets should all be GFCI) you may find they rather quickly develop over 5mA of leakage current and start tripping the GFCI. I wouldn't sweat it and would either lift the ground (make sure you test your GFCI religiously then!) or just use a non-GFCI outlet at that point. But then make sure your outlet is well grounded. There's lot of failure modes with these that could lead to electric shock otherwise.
