Operating Advice for the Summit Kamado


 
Char baskets placed on left and right side, drip pan in middle. Both lit well. Closed vents for smoke temps. Right basket flamed out after half hour or so.

I think this has to do with the left to right burn pattern most of us experience.

When I fill up the whole grate with coal usually only the left side burns

So what is the solution to getting the right side basket to burn properly?
 
I didn't mean vents were closed, just dialed down to maintain around 250.

The left basket was happy with this, the right basket not so much.
 
It might actually be how you lit the basket and if the lit coals were lit enough. I had similar experiences early on and it was due to improper coal lighting.

Since we don’t know how you lit each basket, commenting further is useless.
 
Brett-EDH said:
It might actually be how you lit the basket and if the lit coals were lit enough. I had similar experiences early on and it was due to improper coal lighting.

Since we don’t know how you lit each basket, commenting further is useless.
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Both baskets lit the same way. Lump and brownie starters on top. Both were going very strong before putting meat on. Glowing red and ashed around the starters. It was going for a good 1 to 1.5 hours before it died.

I will repeat again soon to try to figure out what's going on. It didn't affect the cook at all, just refueled the left basket a few times.

Maybe ill try just using only a right side basket as experiment.
 
I just cleaned the grill before this cook. Sweeps look good. One of them sits maybe 1/16th" high over the hole. I would think this would cause the opposite of what happened.
 
HarlanB said:
Both baskets lit the same way. Lump and brownie starters on top. Both were going very strong before putting meat on. Glowing red and ashed around the starters. It was going for a good 1 to 1.5 hours before it died.

I will repeat again soon to try to figure out what's going on. It didn't affect the cook at all, just refueled the left basket a few times.

Maybe ill try just using only a right side basket as experiment.
Click to expand...
Lump and brigs burn differently. If you’re doing lump with a small start and you choke down the airflow, lump will die out.

Lump requires more airflow due to its irregular shape so that fire can transfer from lump to to lump as it burns. You have less surface contact with each lump piece than say briqs.

For LAS cooks, in CBs either fully light the lump in a chimney nd then create baskets and then dial down inflow air.

Starting a small section of lump to maintain 250° in CBs will not work.

And why would you do CBs for a low temp cook? That’s confusing alone to me.
 
It could be air flow with the direction of the wind. You have two baskets over three vents.
One of the baskets is going to be over two vents and the other over one.
I had something similar happening on my performer with the baskets and lump.
Breeze was coming from the left so that basket got stoked more. I wheeled the performer out and rotated and the right side was in the breeze.
After a few minutes both sides felt equal.
 
Brett-EDH said:
And why would you do CBs for a low temp cook? That’s confusing alone to me.
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I saw Harry Soo also using lump instead of brikets+smoke wood on the WSM. I also smoke with my lump on the kettle ( On my WSM I only use lump when I wanna go below 200f, for beef jerky). The theory is lump should provide the heat and smoke flavor, and good quality lump burns a lot cleaner even when chocked. But I also did not get a solid smoke flavor on the kettle yet, so who knows :D.


"Both baskets lit the same way. Lump and brownie starters on top. Both were going very strong before putting meat on. Glowing red and ashed around the starters. It was going for a good 1 to 1.5 hours before it died."

I only have experience with the kettle. But for 225-250 I only need a single basket with lump, lit at one corner. If I would have lit two baskets, set up the kettle for 250, and one basket flamed out, I would not be surprised. IMO there is like a lower limit pf air flow. If you have too many coals lit and limit the airflow as to keep your target temp, you start choking out the fire entirely.
 
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