Post your live HeaterMeter Cooks


 
Kris Pfeiffer said:
I'm using the Heatmeter for the first time. One pork butt, started early this morning. Later I'll be adding a meatloaf.

http://kpfeif.hopto.org:8069
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Having some trouble... the meat temp seemed to be moving up to rapidly. I had a spare probe, so I put that in the meat. However, when I lifted the lid to do that, I must have bumped the pit probe. When I closed the lid, the pit temps registered at 100 degrees more than they were before. It's possible that the meat was resting on the probe, thus throwing the pit temps off. I took the backup problem and started to use that as an alternate pit probe (meat probe #2). Its showing the temps are very high. I got everything closed up...hopefully I can bring the temps down. I'm just not sure what this is going to do to the meat.
 
Kris, you need to be very careful not to let the pit probe touch the meat for sure, that will throw things way off. It's a good idea when you first start using your HM to run as many probes as possible, placing extra probes around the grill at various points to compare to your pit probe so you get a better idea what is going on in your grill temperature wise. This may help you determine the best spot to place your pit probe and understand what the temperature will be at the cooking grate vs the pit probe. Watching the probes you will find that sometimes the cooking grate temps lag below the pit probe, other times it may be higher, ideally they will be pretty close for indirect cooking. It really depends on the size of the fire you have going and the amount of air flow you have passing through the grill. It is very important that you pick a good location for your pit probe and use it consistently and accurately, an inch or two up or down can effect the readings quite a bit.
 
Thanks for the advice...I think we're good now. Indeed, the probe must have been resting on the shoulder. Temps seem good now, and the shoulder's temp stopped its quick rise...I think we're in the middle of rendering out the fat, so we should be good.

For the next smoke, I'll need to figure out a better way to mount the pit probe in there...I rigged something up and it wasn't stable enough.
 
We just had a torrential downpour while I was out running errands/getting lunch with our 8 year old and the Heatermeter had some trouble keeping up with the humidity change. I normally keep the valve on the UDS about 2/3 open but had to go open it up completely, shake/move the fuel around some, and leave the lid off a bit to get some more action going in there for it to recover. I bumped the temp up 20F also to go ahead and finish the pork up.

I'm going to build a v4.1 and a servo damper to help with conditions/changes like this.
 
We just had a torrential downpour while I was out running errands/getting lunch with our 8 year old and the Heatermeter had some trouble keeping up with the humidity change. I normally keep the valve on the UDS about 2/3 open but had to go open it up completely, shake/move the fuel around some, and leave the lid off a bit to get some more action going in there for it to recover. I bumped the temp up 20F also to go ahead and finish the pork up.

I'm going to build a v4.1 and a servo damper to help with conditions/changes like this.

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A damper will allow him to leave the air intake fully open without having temperature overshoots due to drafting through the fan.

Darin: You can put a damper on the 4.0 board if that is what you are using now.
 
Doing an overnight cook of what I thought was 3, but turned out to be 4 picnic shoulders.

http://bbq.converged.ca

10.5 hours into the cook. Had a couple of spikes, but nothing too serious. I don't think I'll be using Fogo lump anymore, seems to be giving me a lot more grief than Dragon Breath

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Todays cook by the numbers:

 
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BBQ'ing ribs while watching the 111th meeting between Maryland and Hopkins lacrosse. Go Jays

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You need to do some PID tweaking to tame the oscillation there Brandon... and make sure your roto damper openings are aligned properly at 100% and 0%...
 
RalphTrimble said:
You need to do some PID tweaking to tame the oscillation there Brandon... and make sure your roto damper openings are aligned properly at 100% and 0%...
Click to expand...

The rotodamper works great and I have that tuned fantastically. I'm tweaking the PID's as we speak. I also set fan to 100% on only, that helped a bit. I messed with them last time I cooked at this is what made the graph stable. It was stable at 250 before I put the food on but as soon as the food went on oscillation. It looks like I'm getting it under control now but my integral is way high % wise. Right now I'm around 87%. The value is now .05 vs .04 it was before (stock heatermeter). .035 was another egg users post but that sent the I off the charts last time.
 
http://bbq.superjett.com It's been going for 13 hours now with a packer brisket and 2 pork butts. I'm doing a salmon filet and smoked eggs after they come off. I've had some strange fluctuations, I think due to moisture evaporating from the 30lbs that's on there keeping temp from being able to come up well. It's a UDS with 2 racks so the top is really full and a ton of moisture is coming out of it.
 
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