MES Temperature swings?

[Bearcarver]

 
I never use the water pan, either.  If I do, the moisture kills the the pellet burn.  Things gotta be really dry at this elevation.

And I have to pre-dry the pellets here.  At 5300', the air is just too thin for reliable burning without taking every possible step.  If I dry them in my oven, I then put them in sealed jars, and they're ready to go.  If I'm doing a cold smoke, I really need the pre-dried pellets from the jars.  If I'm smoking at a high temperature, then the draft through the smoker is better, for one thing, and I also have the opportunity to use the pre-heating smoker to get the pellets really dry.  So that works great.

If I end up using the AMNPS inside of the smoker once I have the little stirring fan installed, I suspect it'll make them burn too fast by keeping the air moving.  So then I'll probably be looking for a way to slow the things down!

Of course, with the AMNPS in a mailbox, any stirring inside of the smoker won't have any effect on the burn.  So then I'll be back to finding ways to make them burn reliably again, most likely.  ;)

At 5300', I would think the Tube would be much better for you than the AMNPS.

Bear

 

[daricksta]

 
I never use the water pan, either.  If I do, the moisture kills the the pellet burn.  Things gotta be really dry at this elevation.

And I have to pre-dry the pellets here.  At 5300', the air is just too thin for reliable burning without taking every possible step.  If I dry them in my oven, I then put them in sealed jars, and they're ready to go.  If I'm doing a cold smoke, I really need the pre-dried pellets from the jars.  If I'm smoking at a high temperature, then the draft through the smoker is better, for one thing, and I also have the opportunity to use the pre-heating smoker to get the pellets really dry.  So that works great.

If I end up using the AMNPS inside of the smoker once I have the little stirring fan installed, I suspect it'll make them burn too fast by keeping the air moving.  So then I'll probably be looking for a way to slow the things down!

Of course, with the AMNPS in a mailbox, any stirring inside of the smoker won't have any effect on the burn.  So then I'll be back to finding ways to make them burn reliably again, most likely.  ;)

But it's all a lot of fun to tinker with.

Meanwhile, I smoked a batch of Pecans the other night, and everything worked dandy.  I ran it set to 225, and it was about 25 to 30 degrees outside.  With the modifications I've made to the smoker, the pellets burned just right, and the nuts came out dandy.  Hopefully the "improvements" I plan to make will actually make things work better.  But there's always the distinct possibility that it'll all cause unintended problems.  Still, it's fun.

My wife wants me to smoke a couple more pork butts because we just ate the last of the frozen pulled pork from the last time.  What we don't eat immediately, I vacuum seal in bags holding enough to make a good meal for two.  Then it's fast to heat up, and makes for a tasty "fast food" treat.  If I get some modifications done before I do the butts, then I'll have to learn as I go again because it'll change things.  Right now, I've got the procedure down to a sure-thing.  But where's the challenge if it always works right? 

The thing I find is that the dynamics of it all change during the course of any smoke because the meat is warming up and drying out.  So the amount of "damping" that the meat provides to the system is ever-changing.  At first, I've got a large mass of cold, wet meat.  And as the meat warms up and dries out, the "load" that it puts on the system decreases.  So things are never tuned ideally over the whole smoke.  Usually, I just don't worry about it, and let the MES do its thing, and the meat comes out fine.

The modifications I intend to make will be trying to create a system where the temperature is more even throughout the whole smoker, and held to a closer tolerance with respect to time, too.

But assuming I'm successful in getting the system to hold a more constant and steady temperature, and keep things even throughout the whole smoker, what will be interesting will be to see if that improves the end product.  It seems like it should, but I'm also sure it'll require a learning curve for me because I think the food will cook faster.

The instructions for our convection oven say that if you use the convection mode, you either need to shorten the cook time or use a lower temperature.  With a smoker, I kind of like long cooking times because they give more time to apply the smoke.  And I worry that having the air actively circulated may make the surfaces of the meats dry out faster.  Maybe that will make the smoke fail to penetrate or "stick" as well.

For doing jerky, I think it'll be great.  For doing something like poultry, maybe it'll let me get crisper skin.  But for something like a Boston Butt, maybe it'll be a disadvantage.  I'm sure it's going to take some trial and error to get used to it.

The advertising hype I was reading for some of the commercial smoking ovens really made a big point of how they managed the air movement within the smoker to get consistent cooking times and smoke application throughout the whole chamber.  The really stressed that everything would be done at the same time, cooked to the same IT, and smoked the same.  And the ways they achieved this always used fancy fan-forced circulation, often with sets of dampers that were motorized to create back and forth air flows at different times in different areas to really try to keep the heat and smoke evenly applied everywhere in the large volumes of these big commercial smokers.

I think with our smaller smokers, it's less of an issue, but it's still a consideration, particularly when doing multiple items placed throughout the smoker.  If I'm just cooking one Butt, or a turkey, etc., then it's not much of a worry.  But if I do multiple little birds, or butts, or fill the thing up with jerky, then it really does become important to have the same conditions everywhere in the smoker.

I've removed all of the factory "guts" of my MES 40 except for the actual heating element and the support rods and that cross piece down there.  Instead, I've got something similar to what a lot of you folks have, designed to move most of the heated air over towards the middle of the chamber which also directs the airflow towards the AMNPS's position.  This has given me much more reliable burning of the pellets.  And It also seems to give me better consistency throughout the chamber.

It's entirely passive, using only the convection draft through the smoker, though.  So it really doesn't do much for me during cold smoking when there is no "draft".  So I've used a computer fan, running on a lower voltage, inside of the smoker to stir the smoke around when doing cheese and butter. And that's worked well.  But I do look forward to being able to have active stirring even when doing hot smokes.

I hate the flu!  Then again, don't we all!  :)

I have a bit of that shoulder thing myself.  But so far, it hasn't caused me enough grief to go in for the MRI that was suggested. I suspect that time will come, however!  I hope you get good news, or at least you end up with a diagnosis that suggests a good, solid fix for it.

Thanks again, Sigmo. Years ago I injured myself in a fall on my property. At that time I did tear the rotator cuff on my right shoulder and had surgery to repair it. The left shoulder was sore but not as painful as the right shoulder. The left shoulder started getting more painful again a few months ago.

But, back to smoking, I also preheat my MES 30 about 30-40 minutes before I put the meat and the AMNPS inside. I still get the temp swings, which fosters mood swings in me. Wonder if the trick to stabilize the smoker temp would work on moods as well?

 

[sigmo]

 
At 5300', I would think the Tube would be much better for you than the AMNPS.

Bear

The tube seems to be what's recommended for high elevation.  I'm just stubborn!  ;)

Back when I first got the maze, they didn't make the tubes yet.  And the maze worked great all of the time.  It's only been recently that I've had a few failures, so the fact that it used to always work has encouraged me to just keep tweaking things to make it continue to work for me.  But I may well get a tube at some point.

I think the thing that has changed the last few years has been humidity.  It used to be very dry here almost all of the time, even in summer.  I'm talking about 5 to 10% being typical.  Now we get much higher humidities.

The maze was fine back when it was always very dry here, but the increased incidence of humid days and nights in summers now has made the difference.  When fighting wildland fires, humidity forecasts are a large part of the planning.  You wouldn't think it'd make much difference, but it really does.  And some (smaller diameter) fuels really respond to changes in humidity very quickly.  I think the pellets are very susceptible to it, too, because the humidity can penetrate into them (or leave them) very quickly.

In any case, because the maze worked great at first, and only recently has begun to have some failures, that's why I guess I've searched for ways to make it keep working.  I just hate to give up on it.  But the tubes look great.  I need to try one!

The beauty of the maze is that it burns for a long time.  From what I've read, even the longer-size tube doesn't burn as long.

After reading about the tubes, I tried to think why the tubes would burn better at high elevations and not go out.  The conclusion I came to was simply that it has a larger bunch of pellets all together at any given place along its length.  A larger cross section of pellets if you will.  And that makes the cherry larger so it creates more heat which drives the moisture out of the nearby pellets and is just less likely to go out.  A bigger fire that supports itself.

So I just started piling the pellets into the maze a lot deeper than I had been.  I pile them in so they're mounded up above the walls a little bit.  I just make sure there are none touching across the peaks of the separators so that it won't short circuit between the rows.  That, drying the pellets, and getting better airflow has made the maze very reliable.  So I've just been doing it that way.  At an even higher elevation, I might be out of luck.

My son moved to a town that's at 7200'.  He's got an MES 40 just like mine (but not modified) and he has the same maze.  It used to work for him when he was here, but doesn't at 7200'.  So he's just been putting some crushed up chunks of charcoal in the maze below the pellets, and he says that works fantastic.  I think he uses pieces of charcoal that are about pea-sized.  And by doing that, he can also use wood chunks.  So I think he does that most of the time.

So the maze, with some charcoal in the bottoms of the VEEs can be made to work with just about any kind of wood chunks to give long-lasting smoke.  I need to try that, too.  But I keep thinking about ordering one of the longer expando tubes.  If I do, I'll get two and give him one to try at his place.  It would be interesting to see if they'll run at 7200'.

 
Thanks again, Sigmo. Years ago I injured myself in a fall on my property. At that time I did tear the rotator cuff on my right shoulder and had surgery to repair it. The left shoulder was sore but not as painful as the right shoulder. The left shoulder started getting more painful again a few months ago.

But, back to smoking, I also preheat my MES 30 about 30-40 minutes before I put the meat and the AMNPS inside. I still get the temp swings, which fosters mood swings in me. Wonder if the trick to stabilize the smoker temp would work on moods as well?

Sometimes too much information leads to stress;)  Then again, sometimes it's good to see what's really going on so we can correct problems that really do matter.  It's a fine line, I guess!

Years ago, a guy at a water treatment plant where I'd done some work needed to put in some new chart recorders to log data required by new EPA regulations.  This was going to be expensive.  And I didn't like chart recorders.  Back then was kind of the dawn of "personal" computers.  So I talked him and the board of directors for that utility into letting me design and program a data acquisition system for them that would take the place of all of their chart recorders and do their monthly compliance reports automatically.

It was a great success and a lot of fun, and, seeing it, another nearby town wanted one for their water plant.  So I built one for them, and installed it.

Prior to these systems, people took "grab samples" of the water coming out of the filters to check turbidity, chlorine, etc.  And they had routines for doing the sampling.  After I got the new system put in this second plant, a few days went by, and I got a call from them complaining that the system had to be messed up because they were seeing all sorts of "bad" things.

When we looked at it all carefully, it turned out that the system was reporting things quite accurately.  It's just that because it continuously monitored all of these parameters, they were seeing things that were real, but they didn't like!  So that was a good thing because it showed that there were times when the water being produced wasn't within the specifications that they thought it was.  Their hand-sampling routines just hadn't been catching samples during those worst periods because those were times when they were busy backwashing, etc., and naturally were not able to do the hand sampling.

By looking at the graphs of everything, they could see what was happening, and relate cause and effect, and take steps to greatly improve the quality of the water they were producing.  So this was a case of having more information leading to real improvements, even though it initially seemed bogus, and when proven to be correct, caused a bit of heartburn!

A similar thing happened when I installed temperature monitoring in some laboratories where I later worked.  The main QC man for the labs was shocked at what he was seeing for temperatures within a lot of laboratory ovens.  And it made him initially suspect that the data acquisition system was giving bad readings.  We then tested things in a controlled way and proved that the data was extremely accurate.  And that simply proved that the ovens had huge variations in temperature from place to place within them.  Again, that wasn't what we really wanted to see!  But it's better to know you've got a problem if it really is a problem.

It also showed that it's very hard to get a good representative temperature reading from inside of an oven because of the huge variations even over small distances.  And it's terrible if the oven doesn't have some form of active stirring of the air.

We installed small fans inside of many incubators to keep them stirred, and that made a huge difference.  But you have to account for the heat produced by the fans themselves in some cases.  The insulation of the incubators can be TOO good. :)

In higher temperature ovens, we couldn't easily install fans, so some of them just plain suck!

Only the drying ovens, which all use pretty heavy-duty active blowing of the air inside, have decently even temperatures.  And even they are not perfect, especially when they have a lot of high-moisture samples loaded.  The best you can do is make sure no part of the oven gets too hot (over the setpoint) and then realize that the temperature will only become uniform after the samples get very dry and all up to near the setpoint temperature.

This seems to be the same problem faced by makers and users of large commercial "smokehouses".  Keeping the temperature and smoke density uniform is a major-league chore!  And in those large units, cleaning them so the creosote buildup doesn't cause a fire hazard or choke off the air flow is a major maintenance issue, too.

I still don't believe that it's too much of a problem to have some temperature swing.  The meat responds to the average temperature.  And we tend to smoke things for fairly long times.  So there's a lot of time over which the cooking effect is averaged.  But it's the variation in average temperatures in different parts of the smoker that worry me the most.

The tinkerer in me wants to optimize things.  And while I don't worry much about temperature swings from the "stock" MES control system, I do worry about uniformity from place to place in the smoker.  I am looking forward to being able to monitor temperatures in different places within the smoker.  But once I do that, I will probably be dismayed at what I see!  I guess we'll find out just how horrifying it really is once I can get some probes hooked up.

 

[Bearcarver]

 
The tube seems to be what's recommended for high elevation.  I'm just stubborn!  ;)

Back when I first got the maze, they didn't make the tubes yet.  And the maze worked great all of the time.  It's only been recently that I've had a few failures, so the fact that it used to always work has encouraged me to just keep tweaking things to make it continue to work for me.  But I may well get a tube at some point.

I think the thing that has changed the last few years has been humidity.  It used to be very dry here almost all of the time, even in summer.  I'm talking about 5 to 10% being typical.  Now we get much higher humidities.

The maze was fine back when it was always very dry here, but the increased incidence of humid days and nights in summers now has made the difference.  When fighting wildland fires, humidity forecasts are a large part of the planning.  You wouldn't think it'd make much difference, but it really does.  And some (smaller diameter) fuels really respond to changes in humidity very quickly.  I think the pellets are very susceptible to it, too, because the humidity can penetrate into them (or leave them) very quickly.

In any case, because the maze worked great at first, and only recently has begun to have some failures, that's why I guess I've searched for ways to make it keep working.  I just hate to give up on it.  But the tubes look great.  I need to try one!

The beauty of the maze is that it burns for a long time.  From what I've read, even the longer-size tube doesn't burn as long.

After reading about the tubes, I tried to think why the tubes would burn better at high elevations and not go out.  The conclusion I came to was simply that it has a larger bunch of pellets all together at any given place along its length.  A larger cross section of pellets if you will.  And that makes the cherry larger so it creates more heat which drives the moisture out of the nearby pellets and is just less likely to go out.  A bigger fire that supports itself.

So I just started piling the pellets into the maze a lot deeper than I had been.  I pile them in so they're mounded up above the walls a little bit.  I just make sure there are none touching across the peaks of the separators so that it won't short circuit between the rows.  That, drying the pellets, and getting better airflow has made the maze very reliable.  So I've just been doing it that way.  At an even higher elevation, I might be out of luck.

My son moved to a town that's at 7200'.  He's got an MES 40 just like mine (but not modified) and he has the same maze.  It used to work for him when he was here, but doesn't at 7200'.  So he's just been putting some crushed up chunks of charcoal in the maze below the pellets, and he says that works fantastic.  I think he uses pieces of charcoal that are about pea-sized.  And by doing that, he can also use wood chunks.  So I think he does that most of the time.

So the maze, with some charcoal in the bottoms of the VEEs can be made to work with just about any kind of wood chunks to give long-lasting smoke.  I need to try that, too.  But I keep thinking about ordering one of the longer expando tubes.  If I do, I'll get two and give him one to try at his place.  It would be interesting to see if they'll run at 7200'.

Very Interesting. You might have seen this before, but here's how I see it:

To start with, I never Nuke or heat my pellets---I just keep them Dry.

I only live at about 400' above Sea Level.

Because of this my AMNS and AMNPS work perfectly, and my Tube puts out too much smoke (no matter what I do).

Over the years I've noticed that Most High Altitude folks have trouble with the AMNPS keeping going, at least to the point of having to Dry or Heat the pellets first, and some just can't get the AMNPS going for more than an hour no matter what they do.

Those same High Alt folks have no problem with the Tube, and are able to cut down the amount of smoke by doing things like filling it half full & shaking it horizontally, so it's not too full.

I've also seen a lot of other low altitude folks say they get too much smoke with the Tube.

So it seems like the best device for a low lander is the AMNS & the AMNPS, and the Best Device for the Ridge runner & Mountaineer is the Amazing Tube (Any of the Tubes).

Bear

 

[daricksta]

 
The tube seems to be what's recommended for high elevation.  I'm just stubborn!  ;)

Back when I first got the maze, they didn't make the tubes yet.  And the maze worked great all of the time.  It's only been recently that I've had a few failures, so the fact that it used to always work has encouraged me to just keep tweaking things to make it continue to work for me.  But I may well get a tube at some point.

I think the thing that has changed the last few years has been humidity.  It used to be very dry here almost all of the time, even in summer.  I'm talking about 5 to 10% being typical.  Now we get much higher humidities.

The maze was fine back when it was always very dry here, but the increased incidence of humid days and nights in summers now has made the difference.  When fighting wildland fires, humidity forecasts are a large part of the planning.  You wouldn't think it'd make much difference, but it really does.  And some (smaller diameter) fuels really respond to changes in humidity very quickly.  I think the pellets are very susceptible to it, too, because the humidity can penetrate into them (or leave them) very quickly.

In any case, because the maze worked great at first, and only recently has begun to have some failures, that's why I guess I've searched for ways to make it keep working.  I just hate to give up on it.  But the tubes look great.  I need to try one!

The beauty of the maze is that it burns for a long time.  From what I've read, even the longer-size tube doesn't burn as long.

After reading about the tubes, I tried to think why the tubes would burn better at high elevations and not go out.  The conclusion I came to was simply that it has a larger bunch of pellets all together at any given place along its length.  A larger cross section of pellets if you will.  And that makes the cherry larger so it creates more heat which drives the moisture out of the nearby pellets and is just less likely to go out.  A bigger fire that supports itself.

So I just started piling the pellets into the maze a lot deeper than I had been.  I pile them in so they're mounded up above the walls a little bit.  I just make sure there are none touching across the peaks of the separators so that it won't short circuit between the rows.  That, drying the pellets, and getting better airflow has made the maze very reliable.  So I've just been doing it that way.  At an even higher elevation, I might be out of luck.

My son moved to a town that's at 7200'.  He's got an MES 40 just like mine (but not modified) and he has the same maze.  It used to work for him when he was here, but doesn't at 7200'.  So he's just been putting some crushed up chunks of charcoal in the maze below the pellets, and he says that works fantastic.  I think he uses pieces of charcoal that are about pea-sized.  And by doing that, he can also use wood chunks.  So I think he does that most of the time.

So the maze, with some charcoal in the bottoms of the VEEs can be made to work with just about any kind of wood chunks to give long-lasting smoke.  I need to try that, too.  But I keep thinking about ordering one of the longer expando tubes.  If I do, I'll get two and give him one to try at his place.  It would be interesting to see if they'll run at 7200'.

Sometimes too much information leads to stress;)  Then again, sometimes it's good to see what's really going on so we can correct problems that really do matter.  It's a fine line, I guess!

Years ago, a guy at a water treatment plant where I'd done some work needed to put in some new chart recorders to log data required by new EPA regulations.  This was going to be expensive.  And I didn't like chart recorders.  Back then was kind of the dawn of "personal" computers.  So I talked him and the board of directors for that utility into letting me design and program a data acquisition system for them that would take the place of all of their chart recorders and do their monthly compliance reports automatically.

It was a great success and a lot of fun, and, seeing it, another nearby town wanted one for their water plant.  So I built one for them, and installed it.

Prior to these systems, people took "grab samples" of the water coming out of the filters to check turbidity, chlorine, etc.  And they had routines for doing the sampling.  After I got the new system put in this second plant, a few days went by, and I got a call from them complaining that the system had to be messed up because they were seeing all sorts of "bad" things.

When we looked at it all carefully, it turned out that the system was reporting things quite accurately.  It's just that because it continuously monitored all of these parameters, they were seeing things that were real, but they didn't like!  So that was a good thing because it showed that there were times when the water being produced wasn't within the specifications that they thought it was.  Their hand-sampling routines just hadn't been catching samples during those worst periods because those were times when they were busy backwashing, etc., and naturally were not able to do the hand sampling.

By looking at the graphs of everything, they could see what was happening, and relate cause and effect, and take steps to greatly improve the quality of the water they were producing.  So this was a case of having more information leading to real improvements, even though it initially seemed bogus, and when proven to be correct, caused a bit of heartburn!

A similar thing happened when I installed temperature monitoring in some laboratories where I later worked.  The main QC man for the labs was shocked at what he was seeing for temperatures within a lot of laboratory ovens.  And it made him initially suspect that the data acquisition system was giving bad readings.  We then tested things in a controlled way and proved that the data was extremely accurate.  And that simply proved that the ovens had huge variations in temperature from place to place within them.  Again, that wasn't what we really wanted to see!  But it's better to know you've got a problem if it really is a problem.

It also showed that it's very hard to get a good representative temperature reading from inside of an oven because of the huge variations even over small distances.  And it's terrible if the oven doesn't have some form of active stirring of the air.

We installed small fans inside of many incubators to keep them stirred, and that made a huge difference.  But you have to account for the heat produced by the fans themselves in some cases.  The insulation of the incubators can be TOO good. :)

In higher temperature ovens, we couldn't easily install fans, so some of them just plain suck!

Only the drying ovens, which all use pretty heavy-duty active blowing of the air inside, have decently even temperatures.  And even they are not perfect, especially when they have a lot of high-moisture samples loaded.  The best you can do is make sure no part of the oven gets too hot (over the setpoint) and then realize that the temperature will only become uniform after the samples get very dry and all up to near the setpoint temperature.

This seems to be the same problem faced by makers and users of large commercial "smokehouses".  Keeping the temperature and smoke density uniform is a major-league chore!  And in those large units, cleaning them so the creosote buildup doesn't cause a fire hazard or choke off the air flow is a major maintenance issue, too.

I still don't believe that it's too much of a problem to have some temperature swing.  The meat responds to the average temperature.  And we tend to smoke things for fairly long times.  So there's a lot of time over which the cooking effect is averaged.  But it's the variation in average temperatures in different parts of the smoker that worry me the most.

The tinkerer in me wants to optimize things.  And while I don't worry much about temperature swings from the "stock" MES control system, I do worry about uniformity from place to place in the smoker.  I am looking forward to being able to monitor temperatures in different places within the smoker.  But once I do that, I will probably be dismayed at what I see!  I guess we'll find out just how horrifying it really is once I can get some probes hooked up.

Loved finding out this background info about you, Sigmo. It's fascinating to find out the life stories and the capabilities behind people on SMF. Yes, I get into micro-adjusting of my MES temps when the logical part of me noggin knows that in the long run the average temp evens everything out.

My personal experience with the 6" tube is that it also tends to snuff out in low oxygen environments, despite the larger volume of pellets inside the tube. I've placed it on the charcoal grate inside my 22.5" Weber OTS where I thought the airflow would be more than sufficient only to have the pellets constantly go out. My goal is to find a better spot because I'd rather use pellets instead of chips for added smoke during grilling. I've also had the pellets go out during cold smokes in my MES 30. I plan to use my new Dust in my AMNPS if the weather ever gets to where I can break out the smoker.