First HeaterMeter build

Here is a picture of my first HeaterMeter build complete with a fancy Tupperware case. Thanks to Bryan for pulling parts from another project to get my meter out to me so that I could have it for this weekend. I will post a picture of it in action with my UDS smoking a 15lb boston butt.

I just put that in the mail Monday, you finished super quick! Glad you were able to get up and running to hopefully show it off in time for Memorial Day.

If you are using it on an UDS, make sure you have a bigger blower then the stock blower that comes with a kit.

A blower of 10cfm would be ideal, I use a 28cfm, but run it at 30% on my UDS..

Looks good though in your tubberware case.

Bryan Mayland said:

I just put that in the mail Monday, you finished super quick! Glad you were able to get up and running to hopefully show it off in time for Memorial Day.

Click to expand...

Yeah it came in on Wednesday had it built that night. Tested out the probes and fan today. Made my little case tonight at work. (Ssshhh don't tell the boss)

John Bostwick said:

If you are using it on an UDS, make sure you have a bigger blower then the stock blower that comes with a kit.

A blower of 10cfm would be ideal, I use a 28cfm, but run it at 30% on my UDS..

Looks good though in your tubberware case.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip I will try it with the fan it came with to see how it works. My UDS is actually pretty good on holding the temp but I wanted one of these so I didn't have to constantly run outside to check. Plus since this is going to be a long smoke with a big piece of pork I needed something to help me in the middle of the night.

John Boswtick, really????

Def don't wanna lead OP astray, but my 6.5 CFM Auber fan cut to 50% can easily take care of an 18.5" WSM. I know it's smaller, but thats only at 50% output. Maybe it's easier to have an overpowered fan than it is to run one at almost max???

I guess it also would depend on how long and constricted your intake vent tube is for the UDS. Interesting nonetheless.

Yah, I tend to think the stock fan should handle it, depending on how efficiently you deliver the air to the UDS. One factor I think is the input tube size and smallish ball valve that is often used on the UDS. IMHO you don't need a ball valve when you run a roto damper, it IS your valve. So those that leave the valve in place after the roto damper are limiting the flow from the stock fan so perhaps a fan that pushes more air helps over come this. I say rig up a fairly large input tube with no ball valve and it should work out. If not, then I would personally build an air burner setup under your fire basket to deliver the air more directly to the fire rather than letting it make its way around the fire and through the pit. With my bullet smoker the air burner stokes the fire like crazy, I see no reason that setup wouldn't be able to get a 55 gallon drum up to 250F.

I have tried using the stock blower on a UDS, its to small for the volume of a 55 gallon drum.

@NickMV If you read my post you would see that I run it at 30%, after many years of testing. 8.4CFM would be fine also , as that is 30% of what I use. Yeah 6.5cfm would probably work once the temp is stable, which is easy on a UDS, but soon as the temperature drops it wont keep up, especially on colder days, as the UDS is not insulated. I have a 3/4 inlet with a ball valve and my charcoal basket can hold about 20 pounds of lump.

When I first started the Heatermeter, it was still known as a Linkmeter, and I believe I was one of the first to have it on a UDS. Once I was able to get everything working, I had lots of problems with the stock blower at the time, which was smaller then the 6.5cfm we have now. So, not knowing a size to try and not realizing I got a 28CFM blower, I gave it a try and it worked. In my testing, it worked best at 30%. if it was set to 35%, I would get a little cooling effect and a bump in the temperature, once the lump over came the cooling effect and I would not be able to control it. If I lowered the max speed to 20%, It would take a very long time to get the temperature from lets say 220 to 230 and almost it would do very little to effect the temperature in a timely matter. But, once I reached the 30% setting I get a fast response to temperature change. I can go from 220 to 250 in a few minutes, where as 20% it might take 30 minutes or longer.

This weekend I have lots of free time as my wife is in Malaysia and I will do some testing at different blower speeds and I will have my link up so that if people are interested they can see the differences in blower speed on a UDS. Its pretty neat once the blower speed of 30% max how much control it has, compared to any other setting.

Yah, there are definitely sweet spots on the settings. I would think another part of the equation would be how the air is entering into the UDS and how directly it stokes the fire. With my air burner setup, for instance, the small holes in the tubing shoot jets of air directly onto the fire and really stokes the hell out of it, like quick... Think of a fireplace bellows and how if you aim it at the right spot of smoldering wood you can turn that into a full on blaze pretty easily, but if you aim the bellows at a spot that is not smoldering you will get nothing from the same amount of air flow. So air entering the UDS in general and air blowing directly on the smoldering coals are two different things. If the air is able to bypass the fire you might get more cooling effect from the cold air intake than it stokes the fire, but if the air flow is hitting the coals directly it will stoke the fire and move into the pit as hot air rather than cold air. When I changed over on my bullet smoker from just blowing air in to the bottom vent to blowing directly on the fire with the air burner the volume of air flow required to maintain the pit was cut in half or more.

Alright so meat has been on for about 10 hours now and seem to be having a problem with my probes. They are reading higher than what the meat is, I calibrated them using boiling water and they were dead on 212. Not sure what the problem is. Any suggestions.

how do you know they are reading high now, but 10 hours ago they were dead on?

JHalasz said:

how do you know they are reading high now, but 10 hours ago they were dead on?

Click to expand...

At 9 am this morning it was saying my meat was at 200 deg. I thought that was a little soon to be that high already so I checked it with a digital meat thermometer and it was reading about 180.

did you boil the digi thermo and it maxed at 212 as well?

the digital thermometer recommends that you calibrate it using ice water which I did before i checked the meat

You can't really calibrate a thermistor probe, if you're using the "offset" configuration option in the HeaterMeter webui. The response of a a thermistor is non-linear so a single offset does more harm than good. The only way to actually calibrate it is to measure a few hundred points and the temperature/resistance at each point and run them through a least squares curve fit to generate new Steinhart coefficients.

Did you set an offset for the probe? If you remove it, is it more accurate?

At the beginning i did have an offset of 1 deg but have since removed it but the temp was still high. The meat is done now so I will have to play with it later to see what went wrong.