Post your live HeaterMeter Cooks


 
JIves said:
Two pork butts on now.. http://grilltemp.ddns.net:8081/

A ton of jitter in the thermocouple which is annoying and new. For some reason I seem to have issues when using more than one food probe. Also the pork butts are tracking oddly differently (I did validate starting temps where right with a thermapen). Will be checking for done-ness as soon as one of them hits 195
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While there my be jitter in the pit temp, it looks like it is fluctuating + or - 5 degree's from the set point and the meat temps are rock solid. Looks like you are doing it right. Enjoy your results.
 
14 hours into Butt. Thank goodness for a remote Heatermeter! I must be crazy for living up here. Can't wait to retire and move south!

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My very first HM 4.2.4 test run. http://82.181.216.181:12345. Temperatures are in Celcius and there is a small roast beef (~3 lbs) as test meat.

Other specs:
- BGE Medium
- Tom's Offset rotary valve
- Pit probe: Thermocouple ETI Crocodile Clip Oven Probe (133-041)
- Food probes: ETI ChefAlarm penetration probe (810-071)
- Ambient: Vishay

The blue goo in the BGE fitting is Sugru, and it's used for sealing air gaps. BGE's thin stainless steel panel was TIG welded to regular steel square pipe, but only with four small dots in the corners because stainless' annoying bending properties.

/Antti


HM1st.jpg
 
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Not sure if this is a known bug: HeatherMeter doesn't handle Celcius->Fahrenheit changes well during a cook. It's fine to change C->F->C while playing around with settings, but if you try to do this in the middle of a cook, things go south.

For many this may not be an issue, but I'd like to be able to use both Celcius and Fahrenheit, as F is so commonly used in BBQ recipes.

Ideally a user could define which scales to use in which places (e.g. Food1 and Pit in F but ambient in C, or food1+ambient in C but Pit in F).

Anyhow, as you can see from the picture, I started my cook with 100C as set point. After a while I wanted to increase the temperature a little bit, and I set it to 225F. At this point all history values were kept as is (i.e. previous temperature reading 100 was still 100 even though the scale was now F and it should have been converted to 212F). This also seemingly messed up the PID - I didn't study this much as I quickly reverted back to Celcius.

CelciusFahrenheitCelcius.png
 
Antti said:
Not sure if this is a known bug: HeatherMeter doesn't handle Celcius->Fahrenheit changes well during a cook. It's fine to change C->F->C while playing around with settings, but if you try to do this in the middle of a cook, things go south.
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That's a great report about what happens but all I can say is "Yup, that's exactly what it does". Nothing keeps track of C vs F, all the values are just numbers as far as all pieces in the chain are concerned (and is why you don't see units anywhere except the HeaterMeter screen). When you change from one to the other HeaterMeter says "the temperature was just 212, now it is 100. The temperature gradient is -112 degrees per second, quick, stoke the fire for all your worth!"

It starts getting really complicated if you try to just shuffle around degC everywhere and just switch it to F for display when you want only certain probes to be in those units, so it probably won't happen because that would mean almost every piece would have to become unit-aware and the conversion would take place at a dozen different endpoints.
 
Bryan Mayland said:
It starts getting really complicated if you try to just shuffle around degC everywhere and just switch it to F for display when you want only certain probes to be in those units, so it probably won't happen because that would mean almost every piece would have to become unit-aware and the conversion would take place at a dozen different endpoints.
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Ok I get your point. I kind of disagree however regarding the complexity: if the internals would use Kelvins, you would only have to do the unit conversion once when any temperature data is displayed somewhere.

My 2c,
Antti
 
Okay, I could use some advice here. My cook was successful, apple smoked roast beef came out perfect and wife loved it! After I removed the meat, I continued testing as this is the first time I'm using my HM.

I increased pit temp from 110C to 200C and everything was fine till the very moment temperature was hitting the target 200C. As expected PID lowered fan, but now pit temperature started dropping and the PID wasn't able to react fast enough. I'm using Tom's roto valve. Is the fan+servo valve combo really so effective that it has the ability to drop pit temperature so very fast? Or should I tweak the PID settings somehow?

For PID and lid detection I have stock values.

HMsettings1.png




FalseLidOpep.png
 
I think something is up with your fire. With the fan running as high as yours is on a bge, the temps should be rocketing. It seems like you may have the grate and/or ceramic holes plugged with small coal chunks which are impeding the air flow.
 
Tom Kole said:
I think something is up with your fire. With the fan running as high as yours is on a bge, the temps should be rocketing. It seems like you may have the grate and/or ceramic holes plugged with small coal chunks which are impeding the air flow.
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I think you're right. I usually hand pick only large charcoal chunks, but today I was eager to start and dumped coals from the bag, including those pesky small ones.
 
Antti, are you using a thermocouple? Something is up with it. Your temps right now (5:50 am est) are jumping around by 2 to 3 degree increments.
 
Yes, it's a thermocouple. This one http://thermometer.co.uk/bluetherm-...ure-probe.html?search_query=133-041&results=2

I've been following the temps on and off while working, and except for the occasional bigger jump the pit temp seems to jump by ~0.1...0.5 degrees.

I *think* you happened to look the graph exactly during the time I changed PID parameters. The PID change happened a tiny bit after the small bump in the pit temperature graph.

I tweaked PID settings because the fan control was so restless - the fan amount changed by tens of % every second instead of being smooth and dampened. Do you have any suggestions how to get the control smoother? Could my super sensitive thermocouple be a culprit? Those ETI TCs react very, very fast.

Antti
 
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Thanks Steve for dropping the email. I was alarmed by my wife at the same time. She actually visits the HM web gui occasionally, which is great! Usually she couldn't be bothered less about my BBQ. I had completely run out of charcoal, there was barely anything left, only ashes and one unit charcoal chunk on the outer edge. This is the first time I manage to empty my BGE, the HM really can force the burning process to the end.

Not sure if this is a bug in the sw, but HM didn't trigger a lid open when I reloaded the charcoal. Perhaps this is because it was already in 100% fan mode?

HMNoLidOpenTriggered.png
 
25 hours and still going. At around 24 hours mark I finally gave up and gave the damn cow a Texas crutch. This *has* to finish before the second night falls. I've refueled my BGE already twice.

http://plathan.com/heatermeter

Super ramp down was triggered a couple of minutes ago at 180F.

HMBeefShoulderRampDown.png
 
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