Fireboard impossible to troubleshoot


 
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DanielSmith

New member
I have a recently purchased Fireboard 2 that I've had some difficulties with, and my interactions with customer service have been less than helpful. I'm wondering if my problems extend to all of the ATC options or if I should ask for a refund and purchase a Signals/Billows.

In both of my attempts to smoke using the Fireboard, it would eventually stop running the fan high enough to maintain temperatures. In case the issue was the flame going out/not enough charcoal, I would try adding more lit charcoal to no avail. The first run was due to the battery discharging, which is retroactively extra infuriating since I would have plugged it in had it just said 'hey, my battery is low'. My second run malfunctioning was probably due to moisture (the unit was out of the rain, but hard to protect it from moisture altogether). The temp would still rise whenever the fan would run high enough, but the fan would continue to run slow, even when the fan speed was set manually.

While I'm not thrilled at the issues, I'm used to technology malfunctioning occasionally. The irredeemable piece is that the device provides no way of knowing what is going on.
 
I believe fan speed is limited on battery power. I have the Fireboard 2 Drive and had an original from the Kickstarter before that. I always plug in when using the fan and have never had a single issue keeping temps as long as there was fuel to burn. ATC’s on charcoal grills are assistants, you still have to start a good fire, have the right amount of dry fuel, etc. They only make it so you don’t have to tweak vents to maintain temperature. You still have to know where to set vents though. Like if my WSCG top vent is too open, I’ll go way over temps. I’m lucky though that the bottom vent can just stay closed.
 
I'm familiar with the requirements and am comfortable maintaining temps on my own. In the second case, there was plenty of fuel, an active fire, and I even tried adding a third of a chimney of lit coals just in case. It had been keeping stable temps for a few hours and just... stopped. It was plugged in and gave no signs of distress, but the fan wouldn't go above 20%, and the temps wouldn't recover.
 
Sorry, I wasn't inferring anything about you abilities, it's just hard to know where people are in the BBQ journey so was trying to level set expectations. There are some people that think an ATC makes a charcoal smoker into in a pellet grill for ease of use :) Maybe you've already done this exercise with Fireboard support, but there's an option to send diagnostic logs to them for review. If you're plugged in and manual, something seems off to be limited to 20 percent. Is yours the Fireboard 2 Drive or the Fireboard 2 and the dongle? I'm not sure if you're using the dongle if you're supposed to power via the dongle or via the USB-C port. With the original, you powered via the dongle. Also what fan and cooker are you using? When it kept temps fine for a few hours, did it ever go above 20 percent speed?

What happens if you just take the FB unit and your fan inside and turn it on and set the fan to 100% manual? I just tried mine and it ran it up to 100% on a fully charged battery with no probes attached (so I'm not 100% sure what the limitations are on fan speed when using battery power or if they've removed that in an update, I just read about it from FB2 users when the new model first came out). I'm also not sure if lid detection ever applies to manual mode or not either if you have it tied to a control channel before setting to manual.

You've likely already checked these, but there are some drive settings in the mobile app. One of them is max fan speed. There's also a device log right below the drive settings that will show things like battery voltage and other info.
 
Thanks for your help. It's hard to establish a baseline shared understanding without a much longer intro.

I'll add some extra detail about the particular session below, but my main question is more meta than that. Specifically, I'm trying to understand if I'm simply expecting too much from the unit in terms of understandability/feedback. Towards the end of the cook, I could not tell if the unit was not running the fan because it didn't think a higher fan would do anything, because the battery is low, or for some other reason. The fact that it didn't control temps perfectly is annoying but to be expected at least from time to time. If the Signals will differentiate between those cases, I'm going to try to return the Fireboard and take advantage of this weekend's Thermoworks sale.

I have the Fireboard 2 Drive with a Drive Blower. Plugged in, the fan will get up to 100% when manually set. With the unit on battery supply, setting the fan speed to 100% causes the fan to run at 47-48%. The UI gives no indication as to why it was only running at 47%. To add insult to injury, when you go to set the fan speed again, it claims the fan speed was already set to 47%. Having the unit not do what you ask it to while giving no feedback like that is nothing short of infuriating. The fact that it can't run full speed on battery is an understandable limitation.

To talk about the specific cook, here's the recording: https://share.fireboard.io/EFE851. In real time, I wasn't able to see the short fan spikes towards the end of the cook. Around 8:20, I add more charcoal as my experience with my cooker is that the initial load runs for about 14 hours. The fan kicks up nicely, helping the new charcoal ignite and raising the temp to the new set point. After the temps start to drop, my attempts to knock off ash from the charcoal and (later) add more lit charcoals failed to stem the tide. The unit does seem to spike the fan speed temporarily a few times, but it never turns on enough. The recording seems to indicate that the fan speed went up when I tried manually setting the speed, but my recollection from observing the device is that that did not actually work. It certainly didn't increase speed as rapidly as it did during my test today. It's clear to me that I should have just turned the fan off, gotten the smoker back up to temp with the vents, and maybe tried the fan again after that.
 
Looking at your chart, it looks like the the Fireboard did control the temps very well for 14 hours like you mentioned. Without being there, it's really hard to say what happened after that. Maybe you triggered too many lid open events refueling and/or playing with the fire, maybe the pause time on lid open events is set too long (another setting option in the app), maybe the vents didn't allow for enough airflow to recover after adding fuel (vs holding temp once there), maybe the battery was low, it's very hard to say. It sure seems that the setup is fine if it can hold the temps that long and even increase them to a new set point many hours into the cook.

Unfortunately from a help perspective I have a cooker that I never need to refuel as I can go probably 24 hours on a load. However, the couple times I haven't put enough fuel due to something taking longer than anticipated, I've just pulled the food and finished in the oven since the food was way past smoke absorption stage and it wasn't worth the hassle of lighting more coals.

I would honestly be surprised if any of the other ATC's give you analysis on why you're cooker is not getting back to temps. Fireboard is generally the leader in the consumer market. However, you could look into the Heatermeter where you have access to everything. I built one and it was very fun to play with, but got tired of chasing probe noise all the time. I think they've made a lot of improvements there with better recommendations on power supplies and more compatible probes.
 
That's fair and thank you for all your help! I lost a lot of trust in the device when it wouldn't run the fan on battery and didn't bother to inform me what is going on. Shockingly bad UX, but I guess that's to be expected in a new product.

I'm pretty sure I can go 24 hours on a load in the summertime. I cannot in 30* weather, sadly.
 
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