MES, maximum smoke time on a wood load?

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deltadude

Master of the Pit
Original poster
OTBS Member
Jun 3, 2008
1,529
37
Sacramento Area
The MES is an awesome electric smoker, it is close to set it and leave it, till done, except for one thing - adding more wood to keep the smoke going.

The goal here is to get MES owners to try and figure out a method to get 3 to 4 hours on a load of wood.

On long smokes that start in the wee early morning hours I would love to load the MES with meat and wood, make sure all is well, then get some sleep. I've been day dreaming about fashioning some kind of wood hopper to auto load a hand full of wood chips, so far the ideas have borne no fruit.

So lets get scientific and have some MES owners record some basic info about wood smoke.

I usually grab a handful of water soaked chips to load in the tray. For my hand thats about 2/3 cup+ of chips. The manual says no more than one cup of chips, plus it says no chunks. I use both chips and chunks. (never add chunks via the tray, load individually with the tray removed and make sure chunk clears tray bars then re-insert tray).

So any ideas about how to go about this?
Owners maybe recording their smoke time for different amounts and kinds of wood?

Also there is residual smoke effect, after the visual smoke disappears, a value would need to be assigned to residual, to estimate total smoke time.

I hope some MES owners take part in this thread and record their smoke times, to benefit future MES. I won't be recording till next Sunday - my next MES smoke. I'm smoked out after doing 10 racks of ribs yesterday. Sorry no pics, except the meat sitting uncooked in the MES, have shown that before.

If owners will post their times, I will create a spread sheet with averages and save it in PDF format for other MES owners. Owners please record your model, 40" or 30".
Does the 30" and 40" have different watt heating elements? That would effect smoke time.
 
I had a MES 40 but it died after 3 uses. I took it back to Sam's today to exchange it but they didn't have any in stock so they refunded my money.

Anyway, to answer your question. I was loading chips every hour on the smokes that I did get to do. I also added 1 piece of charcoal to each chip load to help develop the smoke ring and it seemed to work well for me.
 
I can't get another one locally so I'm pretty much giving up on it. When they work they're great but from what I've read after getting it a lot of people have had problems of one type or another. I think I'm going to get a widebody GOSM for less than half of what I paid for the MES.
 
I am surprised that Sam's wouldn't order another for you or have one transfered from another store.

Dude, I haven't kept any records. Im guessing every hour or 1 1/2 hours.
 
I smoked a few slabs of ribs on the fourth, and only used maybe 2 handfulls of chips. I've been using small lump charcoal pieces with the chips. When we're smoking here, we're usually sittin on our deck with a beverage and listenin to some tunes. When we stop smellin smoke, I only add a big pinch of chips and a few small pieces of lump. During the whole 3-2-1 process, I only added chips and lump 4 times.

Greg
 
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