Anyone else using Kingsford Competition Briquettes with their ATC?


 
A

Alan Erickson

TVWBB Fan
I recently purchased an Auber ATC for my WSM 18.5", and at about the same time I switched over to using Kingsford competition briquettes. The experience hasn't been the greatest. Things seem to work fine for around the first 3 hours, but after that I have trouble maintaining temperatures. The fan runs all of the time, but I can't get up to temp, which I typically target at 275 F. Basically the temperature drops down to around 230. To me it seems like the Auber is moving too much air, so much that it can't heat the volume of air being displaced. I have tried restricting the air flow and that seems to help, but it doesn't completely take care of the problem. For my last cook I switched to Royal Oak lump and didn't have any problems, but it was a shorter high temp cook that only lasted around 3 hours. Still, the lump did seem to work a lot better than the Kingsford Competition. Was wondering if anyone else had ran into a similar problem?

Thanks
 
I have the Auber and a 22.5" WSM. I have never used anything but K blue, and I haven't had any problems maintaining temp at 225. I tried 250 and 275 once, and the Auber did struggle to get to those temps...it took about 2 hours (using Minion) to finally get stable. I have the smaller Auber fan, and sometimes wish I had gotten the bigger one.

I would think more air = hotter fire = hotter temp. I doubt the fan is blowing too much air...that's the only thing it can do if the temp is below target. I wonder if the K competition burns slower? I don't have experience with it, so can't help there.
 
If I'm reading the first two posts correctly, Alan has a larger fan on an 18 and James has a smaller fan on a 22. You guys need to swap fans!

As a long time Stoker user, I have learned that you really only need a 5 cfm fan on an 18 but the 22 works much better with a 10 cfm fan.

Alan, one other issue you may encounter using a large fan on an 18 while running K-comp is ash blow. The lighter ash generated by the burned K-comp has been, in my experience, subject to being sent aloft in the cooker as the cook progresses.
 
I have been using Kingsford Comp with my DigiQ 2 for a while, and I can corroborate what you said.
My experience is that it starts a little hot but then stays good for low and show for quite a while, although i haven't done any buts since last summer so i can't remember if I had to re-load the ring or not. I have noticed in shorter, higher temperature cooks that it has a shorter burn time than Royal oak briquettes, but all that is out the window since they changed those.
 
As far as I know I have the small fan. That's what I ordered. I was wondering if they had sent me the wrong one, but don't think that's the case.

As far as the Competition K, I had read some information on it where they had removed some of the ingredients that aided ignition in order to make it natural. Maybe that's part of the problem. I've also have seen some temperature graphs of it burning, and while it starts out hotter than normal blue K, after a couple of hours it's not quite as hot as the blue K.

In one of the cooks I did see a little bit of ash. First time I've ever had that.

I had several twin packs of the Competition that I picked up from Costco this spring, but I ended up taking a few of the unopnened ones back this week because it doesn't look like it going to work for me.
 
I think it works fine for grilling if you can get past all the white smoke and plywood smell.
 
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