Charcoal Basket Question

[Kendall Cook]

Haven't used a charcoal basket before, decided to give it a try in my stick burner. Loaded up a basket with Kingsford Blue and chunks of hickory, placed a few lit coals on top. I thought the idea was to have the lit coals slowly ignite the others for a long slow burn. I barely had the vent cracked and yet within 20 minutes the entire basket was raging. What did I miss.

 

[A Cleland]

Sounds like you have too much combustion air. How are your dampers set? Any way to seal the firebox off any better?

I have been thinking about doing a refurb on my New Braunfels offset smoker. I am also worried about controlling the combustion air.

 

[Kendall Cook]

If I had closed the damper any more it would have been completely closed. Never had a problem with fire control before, just with the basket. Fire box is 1/2 inch thick and pretty tight square box. Don't lose any smoke anywhere except the stack.

 

[A Cleland]

The last cook that I did on my Bandera, I also tried using the "minion method". The lid to my firebox is not very tight, and the dampers are difficult to control. While it did much better than when I was just burning logs as far as fuel consumption is concerned, it was far from efficient. I am thinking of securing a new firebox lid, sealing the entire damper end, seal the lid with some nomex gasket material, and get a bulkhead adapter that will allow me to use my guru. I am curious to see how the fuel consumption goes with that config.

One other thing that you could try, is to enclose your basket with firebrick to cut down on the combustion air, as long as air is available from the underside. I find that this technique works very well in my WSM when I am going for the 225-250 range. Can't get much higher than that with the firebricks. Just a thought.

 

[Don Reed]

Notknowing what kind of smoker you have this answer is somewhat matter of fact I guess you'd say. Put all your unlit on the end close to the intake damper and pile it back towards your cooking chamber but leave the corner next to the cooking chamber and FB lid empty. Use about 1/3-1/2 chimney of lit and dump it into that empty space. This way the fire burns back towards the intake and doesn't spread across the top of the pile which has more exposed area to be fanned by air coming into the FB. Hopefully that makes sense.