How many vents do you use?


 
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Henry Joe Peterson

TVWBB Super Fan
Just curious to find out how many of the 3 bottom vents everyone uses throughout the cook.

For me, the only time I use all 3 vents is when I have all 3 open all the way to bring the cooker up to temp.

For the rest of the cook, I find myself using only 1 vent to regulate the temp, keeping the other 2 closed down completely. If my temp dips below 225 and the one vent is open all the way, then I'll open up another.

I will admit that my temps tend to fluctuate, and I have to adjust vents several times during the cook. I do get those "set it and forget it" cooks occaisionally, but usually I have to make some adjustments. Is this due to one vent opteration?

Just curious what everyone's experience is.
 
I have had great success just using two-- the temps hold very solid. Adjusting the third would require stepping off the edge of the patio-- I would rather not track the dirt there into the house. It's due to where I position the WSM when I cook-- five feet from the patio door so I can see the thermo from the kitchen.
 
I usually use two vents when cooking below 250?. I keep the vent closed that is facing the wind and make my adjustments with the other two. When cooking at higher temps I will use all three vents.

rj
 
We usually leave the three vents at 50% for our overnight cooks, with the warmer weather have had to shut them down from that early in the morning to keep temp down to 250 at the dome.
 
HJP-

I use one vent like you. I make sure that the lid vent is situated directly opposite to the vent I'm using for adjustments. Works great. The brisket I did the other night held at 240? from 10:30p until 10:30a the next morning (several hours after the brisket flat was remeoved.) No fiddling or fussing. Was only open about 20% or so.

I suspect I have leaks in the chamber and access door, but since I can still get a stable temp, I don't really care to figure it out and fix it (I'm lazy!!)

R
 
Do you guys have any problems with an uneven burn of the charcoal? I always figured that if 1 vent was shut down, that area of the ring would not burn as well. So I always use all 3, and battle high temps quite often. It would be great if shutting down 1 or 2 vents totally wouldn't screw up the burn! LMK /infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif
 
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rob B.:
[qb] Do you guys have any problems with an uneven burn of the charcoal? I always figured that if 1 vent was shut down, that area of the ring would not burn as well. [/qb] <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>The convection within the cooker isn't high enough to make it an issue. If air were forced in each of the bottom vents or out the top, you might have that problem occur.
 
I pretty much always have to use all three vents 100% open to maintain dome temps at 240. My WSM has always run far cooler than most on this board seem to achieve. In the winter or on windy days it's a struggle to keep up above 225. I have recently started using a 50/50 mix of kingsford and lump and my temps have been easier to maintain.

Ed
 
Maybe you could force a warp in the access door-- like the one I corrected on mine-- to give yourself some extra O2 infiltration.
 
That's good advice Doug. I'll try it. When I got the WSM, I removed the extra bend so the door would 'seal' tight against the side of the WSM. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea afterall.
 
I keep all 3 vents approximately half way open to maintain 225 degrees. If the cooker goes above 250 I close all 3, if it drops below 200, I open all 3 fully, but I rarely have to do any of that. It seems to like to just stay at 225, which is fine by me. /infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif
 
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