Welp, that pretty much sucked


 
TimA

TimA

TVWBB All-Star
Well, I’ve heaped loads of praise upon thy Smokefire lately, and she bit me today. 🔥

Went to make jerky. Fired up Smokefire to Smokeboost while I got the jerky out and into strips, walk out and there’s no fire. Darn. Shut off power, and gave her a go. Decided I’d still put meat on grated while it heated up, and only at the end of the 3 pounds going on did I even smell. Nope, no dice again. Shut it off again and back on, this time moving grate and deflector and the square deflector to check burn pot, it had pellets in it. Back together for another go and it sure went...

About five minutes I see smoke billowing from the unit, I’m under my truck putting in transmission bolts, and hip up and go over. Lift the lid and greeted by brown nasty smoke! It cleared up and I could see flames licking up towards the grate....well hell. Unplugged and moved away from the garage, and grabbed the hose and put some water on it, to include uncovering burn pot and putting it 100% out.

It’s going to be fun to clean up as it had a fair amount of ash in the bottom. I’ve seen countless vids of so called “grease fires” on Smokefire and they are almost never anything not considered fairly normal. This was close to being the end of life for this unit.

Anyway, that certainly sucked, but ill give it a good cleaning and give her hell again
 
Wow, that does suck. Nothing like trying to get a couple things done at the same time, only to find your workload increased. :mad: AND you don't have any jerky!

Hope the Smokefire is okay once you get it cleaned.
 
It's too bad there isn't some kind of dump lever on the burn pot for flameout situations like this. Also would be nice if there was a way to activate the auger manually to pump out all the old pellets, sounds like yours for whatever reason didn't want to stay lit.
 
I’ve had pretty good luck with mine over last many months. But I have gone through what you mention above a few times. Since I no longer even try the Smoke Boost, my results are better. And I do baby it by always using drip pans. But I still don’t trust it enough not to always have a plan B. Always have my oven or Big Green Egg lurking in the background.
So many electronics and moving parts. It’s wonderful when everything works as designed. But something is eventually going to fail. This is true with any pellet grill.
It’s just the nature of the beast.
 
That does suck, Tim! I've had an issue or two with my RT that has delayed a cook, or necessitated switching to another grill while I dealt with pellets, auger, etc., so I feel your pain. Hopefully after a good cleaning, she'll fire right up the next time!

R
 
Tim, I know it looks bad but I was running a test last December and after inducing a flameout I reintroduced some pellets to check the auto relight feature. I was late getting the pellets in so instead of a relight I got smoldering pellets with pellets steadily feeding into the fire pot. I shut the lid so I could find out what happens with a fire pot full of pellets, smoke, but no fire. After about 5 or 10 minutes I had volumes of smoke, opened the lid, and suddenly I had a raging pellet fire. The flames reached the top grate. I let it burn itself down and then shut down. No damage to the EX6. This thing can handle a lot of heat. This fire is all pellets - no grease and it was bigger before I took this picture. Auto Relight Fire.jpg
 
Lake day today so haven’t touched the SF yet. I’m relatively confident that it will be fine after a good cleaning, I really didn’t want to put water to it but figured an extinguisher makes a heck of a mess and wanted to minimize my work and potential damage from extinguisher stuff getting into things.

I expect maybe Max the glow plug would need replaced. It was right by the garage and of course I had gas cans within probably 6 feet and just killed it while I could.


An observation: when I got this in November last year (‘21), I had some initial issues. And after those, nothing. Rock solid. Here the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having my 8yo daughter helping, and noticed the last two cooks, it displayed an improper shut down message. Now, those two cooks I had her select shut down from the menu, then I went inside to tend to food and get it on the table as soon as possible. One I waited probably about 15 minutes while I sliced a chuck and got dinner ready and asked her to shut it off, the last (before the jerky) she came in and said she shut it off before I asked.

So this got me to thinking...and it would jive with my early issues when it wouldn’t ignite or would lose the fire due to not getting pellets fed because of a void....if both times she happened to hit the switch before it completed its cycle, it would display the improper shut down message. It seems, to me, that when it senses something out of the norm, it seems to freak out. Now maybe I’m just out in left field, because an electronic device should theoretically do its thing the next time it’s turned on and be good, but it just seems to throw a temper tantrum when things don’t go as it wants.

Almost like there’s something in the software with alternate tables or something that tend to collide. But, it is what it is. I’ll clean and do a good long burn before I toss on food and hope for the best. Just seems with something like a flame out or improper shut down, it has issues that tend to stack up for a bit then it settles down and churns out relatively reliably.
 
Tota
Jason-Jayjay1976 said:
It's too bad there isn't some kind of dump lever on the burn pot for flameout situations like this. Also would be nice if there was a way to activate the auger manually to pump out all the old pellets, sounds like yours for whatever reason didn't want to stay lit.
Click to expand...
Totally agree with this suggestion - shouldn't be too hard for Weber to add a command to the App to let us activate the auger if the SF is powered on but not cooking, cold, etc.
 
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