Post your live HeaterMeter Cooks


 
Nope, not the phone guy, but I do order from Amazon quite a bit and do my best to click your link first. I haven't made any super large purchases lately, but it's been a fair trickle... Gonna grab one or two of those Thermoworks probes now and a few other misc. items... I noticed the probes I had been using went UP quite a bit in price for some reason, maybe it's time for a change...
 
Good to know. It baffles me as to how I got into manual mode since my button has been absent since the debacle a couple of weeks ago. New part is on order along with a couple more HM boards from OSH that haven't shown up. They seem to be having issues. Anyways, onwards and upwards.

It took mine about 10 days from when I ordered until it shipped (just this past Friday). Hopefully they made enough to keep in stock
 
First real cook where I am not playing with something and just left the HM alone on its own and went to bed. Gotta do some PID tuning it seems :)

UDS
Bias:4
Prop:1
Int: .005
D:20
max fan: 100%


hm2.png
 
I too have a UDS and the way I run my HM setup Fan, no more then 30% and I have a 3/4 ball valve at about half open or less. The way I tuned my UDS was to set it up without the HM and then get it up to temp. Once at temp and stable start closing the ball valve until the temp. starts dropping and put a mark on the valve at that point. Now when you put the HM on the UDS, it will raise the temp to set point and fairly stable.

You may also want to up the fan speed more then the 30%, I have mine because I use a big 32cfm blower. The way to adjust the fan % is to watch what happens to the temp when the fan turns on. If it blows to much then you will see the temp go down and then when the fan turns off you will get a huge temp spike. 30% was the magic number for mine.
 
I too have a UDS and the way I run my HM setup Fan, no more then 30% and I have a 3/4 ball valve at about half open or less. The way I tuned my UDS was to set it up without the HM and then get it up to temp. Once at temp and stable start closing the ball valve until the temp. starts dropping and put a mark on the valve at that point. Now when you put the HM on the UDS, it will raise the temp to set point and fairly stable.

You may also want to up the fan speed more then the 30%, I have mine because I use a big 32cfm blower. The way to adjust the fan % is to watch what happens to the temp when the fan turns on. If it blows to much then you will see the temp go down and then when the fan turns off you will get a huge temp spike. 30% was the magic number for mine.


Thanks, John.

I have some peppers to smoke, and some burnt ends. Just a matter of PEBKAC here for me, I'll get it stable eventually.. really appreciate your input! This fan is a 15.3 cfm
 
http://aberickson-blue.no-ip.org

Briskets on. I was planning on doing an overnight cook starting yesterday, but that didn't happen. So we're starting a hot and fast this morning.

Edit: Cooks done. A little more detail. This was a brisket that started out around 15#'s, but by the time I trimmed it it was probably around 12 #. Done on a 18.5 WSM with Auber fan. Used briquettes for fuel. I ended up wrapping in butcher paper at around 165 F, but if I had to do it again I would wrap it a little sooner.
 
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Back at it again on a very unstable day:

http://heatermeter.dyndns.org:56789

In the most of un-scientific of fashions, today was the first attempt in the WSM with the nomex gaskets and let me tell you, it changed *everything*. A lot more air is needed to pump through as the thing is very tight now.

Cook is a rack of pork ribs and a couple of pork spare-ribs.

Paying mind not start with too big a fire, I let the HM start blowing on a piece of lit of vaseline-coated dryer lint in the middle of a pile of lump. Took quite a while, but I didn't care because I still had to buy and prepare the meat. Got everything up to speed and looking pretty good and had enough confidence to go run some errands. Had gotten about 15 miles away when the temps started dropping real fast. Still had the errands to run so I watched as they continued their steady decline. Came back and found that my air-burner manifold had come apart inside. (Still a prototype, so all the copper fittings were just being held together by friction. Had worked in the past, today something happened.) So, I pulled the middle and top off and tried to get the burner back together without lifting the charcoal grate. Nothing doing. So, repositioned the feeder tube that normally goes into the air-burner to blow directly onto the fire and messed with the PID settings until I got something somewhat stable.

So, one hour of stability followed by two hours of wild temp changes and now back to stable.
 
Oh I misunderstood what you were talking about. Yeah I could see how that would be informative.

I've got nothin' going on at my place. The HeaterMeter is just sitting around. I changed the probe names just to reflect what is plugged in. As you can see the ThermoWorks coefficients aren't perfect even with the new 2100 point correlation.
 
Thinking about the suggestion to integrate the "Live Cooks" and "HM Graph's" threads gave me a kinda crazy idea that I am sure Bryan will hate to hear. Someone in another thread posted about enabling twitter through their pi, and I know in the past the ability to add comments to the HM graph had been discussed as well.

So, with "social networking" being all the rage, how about "social pitworking"? If you could add live comments to your HM graphs that would add a social element to the live cooks... how 'bout adding a BlueTooth dongle to the Pi so your smart phone could connect to text comments, upload pictures or maybe even video? So you could text a note that is added to your graph along with a picture when you pop the lid, and have this added to the HM graph as a point that can be clicked to load the picture or whatever... Perhaps an app for the phone could be developed that would allow you to shoot a picture and have it automatically uploaded to the HM via bluetooth and allow you to add a comment?

I know, I know, it's way outside the boundaries of what the HM was designed to do, but it seems to be where this is all heading and goes along with the social networking trend of today.... Like I said, just another crazy idea....
 
Smoking 3 racks of Saint Louis Ribs(10 pounds) on the upper level and 3 racks of Baby backs(8 pounds) on the lower level. Later today ill smoke 3 more baby backs and two plain fatties. Then on Sunday 3 more racks of ribs and some Apple pie bbq beans on the lower rack


http://uds.servebeer.com
 
Ultimate faith in HeaterMeter! Put an 8lb butt on the Big Green Egg this morning, lit the fuse, and left for work. I'm using my damper with a fan set to 40% max speed, and the food probes are 2x ET-72/73 stuck in different places on the same butt. Thermoworks for the pit probe. Let's hope nothing goes wrong before I get home in 12 hours.

http://home.capnbry.net:22675/luci/

EDIT: For fun I set the blower to "On at max only" at 1pm Eastern just to see how it would react with damper-only.
EDIT2: And turned it back off at 3:20pm. If I were home I'd go stir up the coals because it seems I've got ash starting to clog up the works in only a way the fan can fix. It then overshoots every time the fan turns on. Went back to normal operation.
 
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Ultimate faith in HeaterMeter! Put an 8lb butt on the Big Green Egg this morning, lit the fuse, and left for work. I'm using my damper with a fan set to 40% max speed, and the food probes are 2x ET-72/73 stuck in different places on the same butt. Thermoworks for the pit probe. Let's hope nothing goes wrong before I get home in 12 hours.

http://home.capnbry.net:22675/luci/

Bryan, what are the PID parameters for your damper system?
 

 

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