Is Pellet Grill Dust Causing Flameouts a Myth????


 
Lew Newby

Lew Newby

R.I.P. 1/26/2024
I have read this in more than one place but, based on my experience, I'm skeptical. I know I should believe everything I read online especially if it comes from a BBQ "Expert". ;) I use Pit Boss pellets and read horror stories about how much dust is in the bag. I've had flameouts with my Rec Tec and Camp Chef. Causes were adjusting the feed rate too low shooting for below 180° and not moving the pellets down in my Camp Chef hopper. I have never sifted my pellets.

Have you had a flameout you know was because of dusty pellets, not wet pellets which crumble??

Have you never had a flameout you can attribute to dusty pellets??

Thanks
 
I have had my EX6 since February, I have had a flame out only one time. I ran out of Weber pellets and ran to Lowe's and bought a bag of Pit Boss pellets. I cleaned and vacuumed the grill, dumped the Pit Boss pellets in the hopper, fired it up and 5 minutes later came out to white smoke pouring out of everywhere. The hopper and auger were filled with dust. I tossed the pellets and waited for more Weber pellets. Never happened again.
 
I didn't have a flame out like described above. However, when doing one cook I did smoke boost for a while and when I increased the temperature to 275 I noticed that after several minutes the temp in the grill was dropping. I went through shutdown procedure and pulled up the grates, bars, etc and noticed that the burn pit was chalk full of pellets with nothing in there having burned. Sent it in to Weber's customer support earlier this week along with a couple other minor issues (burning pellets too quickly and the door not closing as tightly on one side compared to the other) and am awaiting further word back.
 
John Sully said:
I have had my EX6 since February, I have had a flame out only one time. I ran out of Weber pellets and ran to Lowe's and bought a bag of Pit Boss pellets. I cleaned and vacuumed the grill, dumped the Pit Boss pellets in the hopper, fired it up and 5 minutes later came out to white smoke pouring out of everywhere. The hopper and auger were filled with dust. I tossed the pellets and waited for more Weber pellets. Never happened again.
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Lowes is where I get my pellets. Just got a bag of Weber Grillmaster blend and will try those when I do my next long cook. Thanks for the response. 1 vote for dust caused a flameout.
 
DrewM said:
I didn't have a flame out like described above. However, when doing one cook I did smoke boost for a while and when I increased the temperature to 275 I noticed that after several minutes the temp in the grill was dropping. I went through shutdown procedure and pulled up the grates, bars, etc and noticed that the burn pit was chalk full of pellets with nothing in there having burned. Sent it in to Weber's customer support earlier this week along with a couple other minor issues (burning pellets too quickly and the door not closing as tightly on one side compared to the other) and am awaiting further word back.
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Yeah Drew, that's a different problem. I don't want to skew the vote in one direction. Do you mind if I count that as a non vote since you're a new pellethead? Or am I mis-remembering? My kids call it Lewsheimers. 😁
 
Lew Newby said:
Yeah Drew, that's a different problem. I don't want to skew the vote in one direction. Do you mind if I count that as a non vote since you're a new pellethead? Or am I mis-remembering? My kids call it Lewsheimers. 😁
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Absolutely.
 
I've been using Pit Boss Competition Blend in my Camp Chef exclusively and have had zero problems. Feeds great and although I didn't pay too much attention I haven't noticed a lot of dust in the pellets.
I do get some white smoke on start up but nothing like that picture shows.
Will be doing a couple of cooks with Lumber Jack and Weber Apple for the first time, so I'll see how much different they react compared to the Pit Boss pellets.
 
John Sully said:
Looked like this...
View attachment 10100
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John, I start with the lid open and once I see smoke I close it up and monitor the temp. That's how all three of my grills look on start up and that's been with GMG, Lumberjack, and Pit Boss pellets. I'll pay attention when I use the Weber pellets. I thought the thick white smoke was normal because that's what I get with my WSMs when the smoke wood starts igniting. After a while it becomes thin blue smoke. This is a picture of mine on my first run but I had opened the lid before I took the pic and while doing that I saw what's in your picture. There's still a lot coming out but it fired up. First Smoke 7-4-20.JPG
 
Lew Newby said:
John, I start with the lid open and once I see smoke I close it up and monitor the temp. That's how all three of my grills look on start up and that's been with GMG, Lumberjack, and Pit Boss pellets. I'll pay attention when I use the Weber pellets. I thought the thick white smoke was normal because that's what I get with my WSMs when the smoke wood starts igniting. After a while it becomes thin blue smoke. This is a picture of mine on my first run but I had opened the lid before I took the pic and while doing that I saw what's in your picture. There's still a lot coming out but it fired up. View attachment 10104
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I'm going to be smoking jerky over the weekend, probably both days so I'll pay attention to the smoke on start up.
 
Rich Dahl said:
I've been using Pit Boss Competition Blend in my Camp Chef exclusively and have had zero problems. Feeds great and although I didn't pay too much attention I haven't noticed a lot of dust in the pellets.
I do get some white smoke on start up but nothing like that picture shows.
Will be doing a couple of cooks with Lumber Jack and Weber Apple for the first time, so I'll see how much different they react compared to the Pit Boss pellets.
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OK Rich. You got your Camp Chef in 2019 and you cooked in that lousy Arizona weather this winter :) so I'm counting you as a no vote.
 
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I have not had a flameout with my Rec Tec so far. However, mine starts with some white smoke, too. It would seem to me that is normal.
 
John Sully said:
This is a picture of my start using Weber pellets, set @ 250 degrees. View attachment 10347
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Now, that's what I'm accustomed to seeing on a pellet grill as the pellets start to light up.

John, this may be off target but I'm seeing a lot of pictures of smoky Smokefires on the Facebook group. Some are on start and some after a flameout. We know the software is a work in progress and I'm thinking there may be a bug that's affecting pellet feed. Yesterday my pit was set on 250. 30 min. into the cook pit temp dropped to 190 and stayed there for 15 minutes. I just sat and waited to see if it would recover. Once it started up it was back to 250 in about 2 minutes and maintained 250 for 2 hours at which time I was finished. Some of the "your problem absolutely has to be this" answers to these problems are: Summer humidity, wet pellets, and unburned pellets left in burn cup. I think the latest software version still has some impactful bugs. Possibility?
 
I definitely agree the software sill needs improvement. This is my first pellet grill but I can see how wet pellets and humidity could have an impact on the performance of the grill. Saturday I ran the SF for 7-8 hours on Smoke Boost (made a lot of jerky) without any issues, brand new bag of Weber pellets but the humidity was 80% all day.

I got in the habit of vacuuming the burn pot and inside of the grill after every use, there were a lot of unburned / half burned pellets but I attributed that to running smoke boost for so many hours. I also empty the hopper every 3rd cook and clean and vacuum it, I think it helps control the pellet dust. The revised firmware, 4035, seems to have limited the reversing of the auger which seems helps the amount of pulverized pellets at the back of the auger.
 
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