I hear ya. Personally, I feel like checking on your fire here and there is just part of stick burning, and frankly, tending the fire is part of the fun. But how often you need to check it is dependent on a lot of different variables. For example, how big are the sticks your burning, are they too big or too small for your pit? Also, are you using a digital ambient probe to monitor temps at grate level on your phone, and can you visually see your cookers smoke stack from inside your house?
While I'm fairly new to stick burning, I've put in a lot of time to learn my pit and I've learned that sure.... using bigger diameter splits I can go pretty close to an hour before putting a new split in, and a lot of times it works fine. But some times the bigger splits don't like to burn efficiently and they end up smoldering and give off dirty smoke, causing me to need to poke at the fire, flip my splits over etc to get them burning clean. Preheating the splits helps a lot, but it still has problems with bigger splits some times. If I use smaller diameter splits and preheat I never have any problems at all, but I have to add would about every 30 minutes instead of an hour. That's an easy choice for me, I'd rather add wood every 30 minutes and maintain a clean fire than push it to an hour and get dirty smoke on my food. I also use a
Fireboard to monitor temps and I can see my smoke stack from my living room couch. So as long as I can see I have clear smoke from the stack, and my temps haven't dropped I know I'm good and I don't have to physically go check it until temps drop. If they start dropping and its been about 30 minutes, then I know why they're dropping... it's time to add wood.
