ryan n (musicman)
New member
I am having many issues with the dependability my stoker system. I use it to run 3 18" WSMs (two new design) in competition. I started working with rocksbarbeque on the issues last summer when they started to become a distraction at competitions. After replacing several probes, a fan, and purchasing a brand new cooker, still having issues. Since I can't seem to get a response from customer service I thought I would try to ask here. I am going to just go ahead and post the email I most recently sent which details what seems to be going on. The long story short of it, is that it will start up and run perfectly then part way in to the cook temperatures go haywire and read inaccurately.
Here goes:
"I plug everything in--blowers directly to ports and hook up splitter and hook probes in to splitter, hook up and plug in adapter and connect unit to router via network cable. I then turn the unit on and it runs through and passes the system check. At this point the probes all read within a degree or two of ambient temperature, perfect. Throughout the evening I fire up my pork cooker and then my brisket cooker and everything is going great. About an two hours or so in to my brisket cook something goes wrong--the temperature begins to creep up well past target. After playing with it a while to keep the fire under control, I finally realize I need to verify the temp with another probe. I remove the probe from the chicken cooker that I will not be using until morning and sure enough after a bit the temp stabilizes and read at least 50 degrees cooler than the one I have assigned to brisket blower (target temp 225 and brisket probe reading 285 while replacement reads 225). At this point I decide I need to verify the temperature again and I place a trutemp digital probe in the lid vent. Sure enough, the second probe is reading correctly. I then assign the new probe to the brisket blower. I go to sleep and check the temp periodically through the night with my phone (more so now than before I started having these issues). Oddly enough the original brisket probe settles down through the night, but inevitably goes up again, fluctuating abnormally. Mind you, this brisket probe is a replacement of a replacement of two that were doing the same thing.
I then go to fire up the chicken cooker in the morning. I have adjusted the fire as you suggested to get a more consistent burn. This past weekend the fan chugged an hour and a half and all the sudden would be 20 degrees over target, then fall to 20 below target. During this time it should have evened out eventually, as you have said, but it didn't. Since it was cold I didn't think anything of this and decided to just monitor after I put the chicken on 30 minutes later. Putting the chicken on I noted the lid temperature. It was reading 50 degrees colder than target. I put the chicken on and the fan goes and it comes up to temp pretty good and then shoots 25 degrees past target, all the while the lid therm was reading 25 degrees below and holding much more steady than the stoker probe. By this time the brisket was done so I pull out the good probe and stick it in the lid, then I grab the pork cooker probe and do the same thing. At this point I have three stoker probes monitoring the temperature and am trying to figure out the right one to which to assign the blower. Each one was reading 25 degrees different from the other and none of them were the same as the lid temp. Addtionally all were located in the same general location inside the cooker. My chicken recipe is very much a timed thing, and time was a wastin,' so ultimately I had to decide to take it off the cooker and place it in my FE with my ribs. I don't like to do this as I can get better flavor cooking on the WSM.
The funny thing is all the probes fluctuated as I left them in the cooker and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason when or why the temperature suddenly changes. At one point they would be closer together in temperature and others not. Otherwise it would be easy to adjust the calibration, but since they aren't consistently reading the same it is not. It would also be one thing if this is how the unit performed out of the box. I could then just blame it on a lousy product, but I know better. I know from experience this thing can run without any worries--set it and forget it. Unfortunately, it no longer seems to be doing that.
At this point I am not sure what to do. These issues are a real distraction at contests when, as you know, we have hundreds of other things parsing our attention. I feel I have in good faith responded to all of your suggestions and queries. I purchased new splitters, new probes and ensured my fires are burning evenly and any airleaks mitigated to the greatest extent feasible. I used it many, many times without error prior to these problems, and have a solid understanding of how the system works.
Here goes:
"I plug everything in--blowers directly to ports and hook up splitter and hook probes in to splitter, hook up and plug in adapter and connect unit to router via network cable. I then turn the unit on and it runs through and passes the system check. At this point the probes all read within a degree or two of ambient temperature, perfect. Throughout the evening I fire up my pork cooker and then my brisket cooker and everything is going great. About an two hours or so in to my brisket cook something goes wrong--the temperature begins to creep up well past target. After playing with it a while to keep the fire under control, I finally realize I need to verify the temp with another probe. I remove the probe from the chicken cooker that I will not be using until morning and sure enough after a bit the temp stabilizes and read at least 50 degrees cooler than the one I have assigned to brisket blower (target temp 225 and brisket probe reading 285 while replacement reads 225). At this point I decide I need to verify the temperature again and I place a trutemp digital probe in the lid vent. Sure enough, the second probe is reading correctly. I then assign the new probe to the brisket blower. I go to sleep and check the temp periodically through the night with my phone (more so now than before I started having these issues). Oddly enough the original brisket probe settles down through the night, but inevitably goes up again, fluctuating abnormally. Mind you, this brisket probe is a replacement of a replacement of two that were doing the same thing.
I then go to fire up the chicken cooker in the morning. I have adjusted the fire as you suggested to get a more consistent burn. This past weekend the fan chugged an hour and a half and all the sudden would be 20 degrees over target, then fall to 20 below target. During this time it should have evened out eventually, as you have said, but it didn't. Since it was cold I didn't think anything of this and decided to just monitor after I put the chicken on 30 minutes later. Putting the chicken on I noted the lid temperature. It was reading 50 degrees colder than target. I put the chicken on and the fan goes and it comes up to temp pretty good and then shoots 25 degrees past target, all the while the lid therm was reading 25 degrees below and holding much more steady than the stoker probe. By this time the brisket was done so I pull out the good probe and stick it in the lid, then I grab the pork cooker probe and do the same thing. At this point I have three stoker probes monitoring the temperature and am trying to figure out the right one to which to assign the blower. Each one was reading 25 degrees different from the other and none of them were the same as the lid temp. Addtionally all were located in the same general location inside the cooker. My chicken recipe is very much a timed thing, and time was a wastin,' so ultimately I had to decide to take it off the cooker and place it in my FE with my ribs. I don't like to do this as I can get better flavor cooking on the WSM.
The funny thing is all the probes fluctuated as I left them in the cooker and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason when or why the temperature suddenly changes. At one point they would be closer together in temperature and others not. Otherwise it would be easy to adjust the calibration, but since they aren't consistently reading the same it is not. It would also be one thing if this is how the unit performed out of the box. I could then just blame it on a lousy product, but I know better. I know from experience this thing can run without any worries--set it and forget it. Unfortunately, it no longer seems to be doing that.
At this point I am not sure what to do. These issues are a real distraction at contests when, as you know, we have hundreds of other things parsing our attention. I feel I have in good faith responded to all of your suggestions and queries. I purchased new splitters, new probes and ensured my fires are burning evenly and any airleaks mitigated to the greatest extent feasible. I used it many, many times without error prior to these problems, and have a solid understanding of how the system works.
