I recognised the risk last year and bought myself a Looftlighter.
Now I light the charcoal in place, no burnt spots on my deck. I have large paving stones on my deck, but was still spilling charcoal from the chimney starter.
The Looftlighter is amazing, lights a small patch in less than 2...
My original door fitted better than this cajun Bandit one. Also, the original is easier to shape-to-fit.
Also, I think the WSM works best with a little bit of leakage.
To throw in my 2 cents ....
If you smoke in the winter time, in windy conditions, rain, snow, then a Stoker will help regulate the airflow to make sure you run at a consistent temperature.
StokerLog will also help you spot when you're nearly out of fuel !
In terms of being more tasty, I've...
Ribs are funny things, it's taken me a year to figure out what I like and I found it by accident.
A rushed cook job drove me to cook the ribs at 300F instead of 225F. From StokerLog I suspect my average temp was 280F.
I also by chance left the rubbed ribs in the fridge for two-hours as I had...
Had a weird one ... the one and only sensor connected suddenly went from being fire-control to a food probe when I was changing temperature setpoint. I had to restart the Stoker to fix this problem.
So I upgraded to v6.8 and this behaved better, but I didn't change the temperature set point...
It's the black Stoker, upgraded to the wireless enabling Firmware in Feb/March. I did not have this problem on the old version of StokerLog (v4.1) as I changed the target temps a couple of times with no issues.
I upgraded to v6.7 before my Sunday cook and changing the target temperature caused...
Of course the sooner you have your unit, the better !!
Right now, we have a work-around (goto the main.html page and change the target temp from there), so waiting for a fix is fine.
BTW, is it possible for StokerLog to command the Stoker to dis-associate the blower ? Or is it likely that the...
Weird occurence ...
After running for three hours with intermittent loss of comms, but all recovered, I decided to ramp the setpoint temperature from 227F to 260F. I made the change to the trget on StokerLog then Updated the Stoker.
I expected to see the fan switch on, but nothing happened...
As long as you configure your StokerLog to the IP Address of your Stoker, it should receive data every second.
If you're mnitoring through the Stoker Webserver that might update infrequently.
I made sure the Stoker was left at the top menu level. I installed the mouse jiggler program to keep my computer awake.
Everything worked great, except for the one telnet problem.
I also realised I had an old version of StokerLog. I'll do ribs tomorrow and see how it behaves ...
The Cajun Bandit door has been on for two cooks and I couldn't figure out how to get a good seal.
The original is now back on and will see if it was in fact better. I think it will be.