Exploding Weber Smoker


 
J

John Gryszan

New member
Several days ago ,after 2 hours into smoking several racks of ribs, I heared a loud noise and found the top of my Weber Smoker on the ground. The ribs were dusted with ash from the charcoal and the water pan was off its holder and on the charcoal. The bottom vents were 3/4 closed at the time and the top vent was fully open. Obviously the top was blown off.........but how?
Has anyone experienced this? I am puzzled as to how the lid would blow off considering its weight and also the lid is "vented" with the vents fully open....so how pressure could build up is puzzling.
Could the water pan have slid off and caused a steam surge to blow the lid off?
 
Check out your neighbors. Anyone with an ashy faced appearance is suspect.
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Originally posted by John Gryszan:
Could the water pan have slid off and caused a steam surge to blow the lid off?
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I have never heard of this happening before, but I think you may be onto something with the water pan idea.

We have had past reports of people spilling the pan contents into the fire and generating big plumes of steam and burning hands/arms. We've also heard of pans being filled to the tippy-top with water and fat drippings from meat (which float on water) overflowing into the hot coals and causing rocket-like flames to shoot out of the top of the cooker.

Cookers like Big Green Egg experience something called flashback. You may have had something similar happen, but due to steam or grease fire, even with the vents open.

Kid pranks and nosy dogs are also a possibility.

Regards,
Chris
 
I had my dog jumped on mine one time, it was cooling off after cooking but I guess my dog smelled what I had cooked and wanted some more. Mine was knocked over completely lid, racks, charcoal etc was scattered everywhere. I would say a animal or kids hit it and knocked off the lid and pan. I wouldn't think even a surge of steam would blow the lid off but it might.

Randy
 
When water boils, the steam expands to a volume of about 1700 times the volume of the liquid water. A gallon of water is 231 cubic inches, so a cup is 14.4 cubic inches. A cup of water will produce 24,500+ cubic inches of steam (that's about 14 cubic feet). So, I think that even one cup of water flashing into steam could easily blow the lid off the WSM. The area of the vents is very small in comparison to the interior area of the lid, and the boiling of the water, when dumped directly onto hot coals, is very rapid - so I don't think having the vents open would relieve enough pressure, quickly enough, to keep the lid from popping off.

But, if you still have doubts, there's always the Mythbusters.
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Originally posted by Larry D.:
When water boils,
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because it hits the burning charcoal it puts the charcoal out and no more water is vaporized. So at the same time, we have water being vaporized and water putting out the charcoal - two opposite things happening at some rate or the other. Since it has been about half a century since I took/used Calculus, send it to Mythbusters
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Keep in mind that the water in the pan is already at its boiling point, it won't take much additional heat to vaporize it. Even though the charcoal is no longer burning it will still have enough heat left in it to vaporize a large portion of the water.
 
It's been a quarter century since I took 5'th year college chemistry but I seriously doubt that the blow out could have been due to steam build-up. Required would be a system totally closed meaning well sealed, at least, and lots more heat.
 
If I remember Physical Chemistry 540 correctly, the energy required to heat H2O is vastly less than that necessary to vaporize (think about the difference between just loosening up bonds between adjacent molecules of water vs. that necessary to completely break those bonds)

On a quick search I found the following

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/9825/icesteam.html

So whether the water is a few degrees of boiling is not very significant since the energy required to heat (per degree C) is over 500 fold greater to convert to steam.

The question is whether a modest amount of water can generate enough steam rapidly enough to increase the pressure within the WSM to launch the top…..sounds like experiments need to be run.

After all this is not rocket science…oh, yea, maybe it is….
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Originally posted by Don Irish:
After all this is not rocket science…oh, yea, maybe it is….
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You ever see pics of rockets taking off - great billows of white smoke??

That white smoke is steam - the concrete launchpad is flooded with water which when the rocket blast hits it vaporizes, absorbing a great deal of energy and so the concrete is not incinerated. This works BECAUSE of water's high latent heat of vaporization, LV, 540 cal/g
 
I would bet that the water pan wasn't sitting on the tabs right and it fell off and all that hot water went on to the hot coals and lift off occured.
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Here is something different to consider. Were you using lump? If the answer is yes maybe there was a rock in the bag that you didn't see. Said rock gets hot and explodes. There is other threads here talking about this. Anyhow the rock explodes and knocks the water pan off and you can take the rest from other posts/theorys here.

Just a guess though.
 
One of you people that bought 4000 bags of that coal when it went on sale... fire up two fully-lit chimneys, set a pitcher of hot water in there with a string tied to it, get back, and yank.
 
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