Heatermeter testing

Hi All, John Bostwick built and printed a Heatermeter and RD3 combo for me and mailed them to me in Australia.
I would like to compliment John on the way everything just worked out of the box, and for his advice and assistance in my starting the learning journey.

This is the combo I ordered.

I felt it was appropriate now though that I share my experience here in the forums so that others that are starting out like me can have an opportunity to access the knowledge that I gain by sharing my experiences.

There are only 3 of us in my family though, sometimes we do have friends and family over, I really don't have any use or desire for a huge BBQ.

I have a hooded 4 burner BBQ and I'm quite experienced in using it for steaks and burgers and roasts. Both with and with out using the rotisserie.

Some time ago I bought a 22 1/2 inch Weber Classic Kettle, with a desire to cook some of the delicious roasts that my Dad used to create with his years ago, when I was a teen.

Unfortunately I wasn't aware that the Weber "Classic" is not the same as the Weber that Dad had, and apparently they are notorious for not being able to maintain a fire.

That is what happens with mine.
If I set a fire... no matter how hot, even with the vents fully open , the fire goes out.
If I lift the lid and introduce some air (by fanning with a piece of cardboard or using a mechanical fan) to the fire I can "stoke it up" so to speak, but it will slowly go out again after the lid is put down.

I'm told that the reason it happens is believed to be due to different air convection because of the design of the shallower bowl.

I could have bought a new one, but I decided to go with a Heatermeter and RD3.
If I can make it do what I want then I will have a far better set up than I would have if I had just changed to the conventional Weber Kettle.
( I may in the future add an extension ring to my Weber Classic as well.)

So I have received my Heatermeter and RD3 combo and had it running on my desk I had to wait for some additional components to be fashioned but its all here now.

I am attaching my RD3 using a Dogs bowl with a pipe welded to it.


The white tape is silicone self amalgamating tape.
I was not able to source stainless steel tube that would give me a press fit in to the outlet of the RD3.
The sheet metal shop ran a couple of welds round the tube but it was still too loose.
This seems to work fine.
The Dogs bowl is positioned over the vents that were in the bottom of the Weber Bowl.

I dont have a photo of the bottom with the original vent in position but it is identical to the one in the lid

(I have removed the rotary sliding ventilation regulator and used the screw hole that held that to attach my dogs bowl.)
I just realised that I didn't take a pic of the Dogs bowl and RD3 in place, so I have taken one just now (not actually in use.)



I did a test cook yesterday.
The results were not great, but it was a test cook... designed to give me a base line with out wasting food.

I'm happy with the data I gained and I have lots of stuff I want to try to make it do what I want.
The Heatermeter and RD3 performed faultlessly, the issues were probably on several fronts that I need to test more to try to resolve.
John said to me "Be conservative with your fire, it's easier to heat a fire up than it is to cool it down."

So I started my test cook very conservative... I believe I was too conservative, but I needed a base line.
I decided to use a 3+2 "fuse" or "snake" method to build my fire.
I lit 5 briquettes in my chimney and positioned them at the end of the snake.
I placed a Paving block and a tray of boiling water as a heat sink and to simulate some meat altering the air flow in the kettle.
I used a potato to hold my meat probe.




The fire increased in temperature very slowly.
I decided to just allow it to go to see where it went.

Continued in my next post due to 10 image limit.

Continued from Post #1...
Here is my graph of the whole "Cook" with some notations.


1 I started it as I previously described. Just before 14.28 I noticed the temp starting to drop so I opened it the lid and used my Loofa lighter to spread the fire to more briquettes.
2 I set the initial set point low because I wanted to see how the heater meter responded as it approached setpoint.
I didn't anticipate that it would be so long.
When it did start to respond I really wanted more to see if it was going to get to a higher heat so I lifted the set point to 350F.
If you look closely you can see a tiny blip where the Heatermeter went to 98% for just a few seconds as it approached setpoint.
3 My son believes I may have discovered the secret to perpetual motion... somehow I made the potato hotter than the inside of the BBQ was!!!
I'm not sure if it is that the Pit probe was not in the hottest part of the pit?
Or is there an issue with the calibration of the probes? All probes (I have two meat probes ) were reading very close to the same at ambient on my desk.
This is a photo of how the Weber was set up initially and how I changed it.

It didn't make any difference anyway.
4The potato achieved the recommended temp for a cooked potato so I took it off. and left the probe to lay on the ground for the rest of the cook.
My son said it tasted nice.
5 The Pit achieved it's Max temp.
I opened it soon after to verify that it had reached the end of the snake and it had.
Then I closed it and continued to monitor it just to see how slow or fast it cooled.

RD3 was set to 100%
Lid vent was fully open.
I couldn't feel any heat (air) escaping from around the hood seal or from the place where my dogs bowl joined the weber bowl.
There was plenty of hot air coming from the lid vent (of course).
Its currently winter here but it was a very mild day, Temperature range during the cook was from approx 66F to 50F at the end.
Things I plan to try in future test cooks...

Reduce fan to 50% or even 30%.
I'm wondering if the fan was blowing my heat out of the vent.
I thought that perhaps I may have had to reduce it due to ash being blown around in the pit but I didn't see any of that behaviour.

Play around with different vent openings.
Bigger initial fire.
Different types of fire... ie use the Weber baskets with the 60 briquettes that they recommend in the manual.
Well, that is the report of my first test cook with a Heatermeter!

Thanks for the kind words. I hope you have some good bbq now.

Well I believe I have solved the issue I had with the slow heating of my Weber.
I did a second test cook. I made 2 changes and I'm impressed with the results.
The changes I made are I used 20 briquettes in stead of five (as an initial fire) and I closed the vent down till there was only a small opening (about a toothpick sized opening).
I was impressed with how fast the pit reached my nominal setpoint for testing of 350F.
I allowed it to hold for about 5 minutes which it did very well then I increased the setpoint to 425F.
It struggled a little to get the fire going again... but that's understandable.
To me this testing is all about me getting a feel for what I'm doing and how the system as a whole reacts to what I do to it.
Over all I was impressed with how it performed.


Tonight I cooked a chicken on it and I used some BBQ smoker pucks.
I had way too much smoke.
The heatermeter didn't get to temp as fast and didn't hold temp as accurately as the previous test.
I did everything the same apart from the smoke, so I'm thinking perhaps the smoke made the fire harder to control.
The chicken tasted great though.

It's not as pretty, but as long as the chicken tasted as good as it did I don't care!.