First HM Smoke Didn't Go Well :(

[MichaelJF]

I'm not sure what to try on my next cook to improve things. It seemed, no matter what PID settings I tried on the HM, the pit temp would just drop any time the blower came on.

After a while I just started trying the blower on manual mode to see if I could manually get the pit temp to rise. Unfortunately no matter how low or high I manually set the blower it would still drop the pit temp.

What really confused me was that I could get the pit well over 300 by just opening the door. Obviously this was because it was getting flooded with oxygen. It got me wondering if some of the issue was the angle of my blower attached to the bottom vent and that maybe it was just blowing air to the top of the pit and cooling it down instead of blowing on the coals stoking the fire.

Here's my setup.
22" WSM with water
10cfm Auber blower
HM 4.2
Bottom vents closed
Tried top vent wide open to just barely cracked.

I'm not sure how much it helps but here's my graph.

 

[Steve_M]

Your picture isn't showing, it most likely isn't publicly available.

The fact that the temps dropped when the blower came on means that the blower is cooling down the fire, which means it's too powerful. Set the max speed of the fan in the config to 25% or 30% and see what happens.

 

[MichaelJF]

Thanks for the reply, Steve. I think I fixed the picture.

Sorry for not mentioning this earlier. When I had the HM in auto at the beginning I believe I started at 40% max and tried it down to 20% then 10%. It just seemed to drop the temp slower. You can see after about 17:00 I started testing the blower in manual mode about as low as possible. Where it gets flat in a few places is where I tried it at 10% then 5% a couple times. You can see the pit temp steadily goes down during those times.

 

[Steve_M]

Well, at least Batman showed up at 18:00

What happened at around 19:45 where the temps are dropping and then spike up? There's no fan activity during that time.

Maybe try the dogbowl method to attach the fan. It might get the fan just a little further away as well.

 

[MichaelJF]

Batman. LOL.

After about 19:00 I just turned off the fan and opened the vents and door a few times to get some heat into my pork so I could just take it off. I started late so it's in the oven now.