Pit Boss 1150 temperature issues

[Tbone2000]

I bought the Pit Boss 1150 at Lowes 3 or so years ago. It's worked well and I've been quite please, especially for the price. I will add that before this recent smoke I had cleaned all the dust out from everywhere and removed the internal plate and replaced it with a heavy duty square plate around 14"x14" over the heat pot in hopes to improve smoke processing etc. I recently purchased the Meater XL Pro temp spikes and cooked 2 briskets last weekend each with 2 spikes in it. Those familiar with the Meater Spikes, they measure the internal temp but also measure the ambient temp. I had to leave the house for about 4-5 hours. An hour or so in I had the Pit Boss set for 250 degrees and it's ambient monitoring probe was showing 250 degrees. The Meater probe ambients were showing from 140-160 degrees. The briskets were both on the top shelf which some say gets the hottest although perhaps that's only on offset smokers. So I had my wife check the pellet bin and all was good and lots of smoke coming out so I had no choice but to raise the temp of the grill. I bumped it up around every 15 minutes until I got to a temp that kept the ambient around the briskets on the top rack at 225-250 degrees and that was at 400 degrees! Now, the brisket did come out nice, but, my understanding is that the smoke drops off as you run the smoker up over 300 and closer to 350 and 400. What I hadn't been able to do is run some other probes around the same areas to understand if the ambient probe was just bad, meaning when it thought it was at 400 it was really only at 225, which would be the best scenario as I would still get great smoke. I have a feeling that the first rack is getting closer to 400 and for some reason the heat is working it's way over towards the chimney and just not getting around the items on the top shelf. Maybe the shelf is just too high up and I have to look at getting a higher end smoker where the top rack is at a lower position and perhaps the heat will circulate better? A Yoder or Lone Star Grillz? I do prefer pellet even though that's not the preference of the purist's mainly because I have to simplify the process and I've been able to smoke some great stuff with the pellet smokers.

So, what I'm wondering, has anyone else run in to this and is it a common problem with all smokers or is it that the Pit Boss is just not a very good smoker. And in case you're thinking, perhaps the problem is the ambient with the meater probes which I would say unlikely because they all read close and the 13.5lb brisket (before trimming) took about 15 hours which sound reasonable at 225-250.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Doug

 

[JIMSMOKES]

Google Pitboss air gap mod.

 

[Tbone2000]

Google Pitboss air gap mod.

Excellent, thank you. I will take a closer look.

 

[mike243]

Welcome, so it worked well for 3 years then you moded it and now it stopped working properly? I think I would put back stock and see if there was a problem still or the mod wasn't a good idea. over 6 years on my PB and still running properly. not all fixes fix stuff lol.

 

[BigW.]

Any other thermometers other than Meater? I might try running it empty with different therms to check readings. Then remove your recent upgrade and see if there is a difference. Just because the ambient temp readings were similar, does not mean they're 100% accurate. With that much meat together in tight quarters it may effect the accuracy.

 

[Tbone2000]

Welcome, so it worked well for 3 years then you moded it and now it stopped working properly? I think I would put back stock and see if there was a problem still or the mod wasn't a good idea. over 6 years on my PB and still running properly. not all fixes fix stuff lol.

Not necessarily. I have used it for 3 years but typically had the meat on the bottom rack but after a lot of researching it seemed that I would get better results. But the main thing that changed is I started using spikes that have ambient temp and with those I realized that I was smoking at a temp that is way lower than I thought. Sounds like the mod might allow the smoker to match more closely to what it should be.

 

[Tbone2000]

Any other thermometers other than Meater? I might try running it empty with different therms to check readings. Then remove your recent upgrade and see if there is a difference. Just because the ambient temp readings were similar, does not mean they're 100% accurate. With that much meat together in tight quarters it may effect the accuracy.

I do also have Inkbird spikes but I believe all the spike want an internal temp that is less than 225 so when it's hotter they just display overtemp and I really want to see how things correlate on the bottom and top rack at like 200, 250, 300 and 350. At least the Meater spikes do that. I do have other temp probes and as you suggested is something I plan to try and see what results I get. I did buy the mod so perhaps I try it first without the mod and then with the mod and see what happens.