I'm not sure if this topic or something similar is already posted, but I couldn't find it using Tapatalk, so I thought I would start a new thread.
The cooking area on my new smoker is about 30" wide (the right half of the attached image), & I have a large round smoker box. It seems to hold heat really well, but during am 18 hour cook this past weekend I used an 18# bag of charcoal (started the fire with about half of it) & 30# of foot long pecan logs. That seems like a lot of fuel. It was in the low 50's outside. I watched the temp and kept it around 225 from about 11:30pm til 3:30am. I was probably adding a small log and a few coals every hour. I added another log and a few coals & went down for a 2 hour nap. When I woke up, it was down to 160. I threw 2 logs on, opened the damper on the SFB, & slept for another 2 hours after which it was 180. It seems like after the initial coals were burned it was hard to keep the temp consistent.
Any basic fire building/temp maintaining advice would be greatly appreciated.
Any basic fire building/temp maintaining advice would be greatly appreciated.