Pellet Smoker - Biggest Beginners Mistake #pelletsmoker #beginnersmistake #doNOTdoit #verticalsmoker

hey guys grill sergeant here what's going on grillbillies today in this episode we're tackling issues every new pellet smoker owner gets extremely frustrated about let's start the show [Music] if you are new to the pellet smoker world or you're contemplating getting your first pellet smoker this video is for you or if you know someone who just got a pellet smoker probably want to share this video with them or if you know someone who knows someone who before we dive in if this is your first time on this channel i'd ask you to hit that subscribe button and that bell button so you're notified on all the epic backyard barbecue cooks we do come on click it click it all right welcome aboard all right let's face it there's nothing more frustrating than buying a brand new smoker and expensive meat only to have the smoker air out on you or the food not to come out how you wanted it now whether you have a vertical smoker like this one or a barrel smoker regardless of the make and model as long as your smoker is a pellet smoker the advice in this video is going to be universal the dangers that come with a new pellet smoker range from the food sucking being either over or undercooked to the extreme of this [Music] [Applause] oh my god yes that smoker literally exploded now i don't want your food to suck or for your smoker to now before we dive in it helps to understand how a pellet smoker works a pellet smoker regardless of its shape or size can get broken down into four things you have your hopper you have your auger you have your firebox and you have a cooking chamber that's pretty much it now let me explain each one the hopper is basically where your wood pellets go there's usually a flap that you can lift up and you can dump your wood pellets in and some smokers are nice you basically get like a glass site so you can see and then a hopper pound rating will go along with a smoker so sometimes you'll see a smoker that says with a 20 pound hopper this one has a 45 pound hopper that basically lets you know how many pounds of wood pellets you can fit in your smoker so this tube right here that's the auger your auger will start spinning it will take pellets from the hopper and then we'll put them into the firebox now down right over here that is basically your heating element and that thing is what gets really really hot and that is what actually catches the pellets on fire now you do have a fan system in here that will basically keep the flame at a certain temperature and lastly comes your cooking chamber and that's basically the room you have to smoke your meat the main difference is between the vertical smokers and then the barrel type smokers is the barrels are good at grilling your meat so if you did want to put steaks on they do have usually what's known as like sear settings whereas the vertical smokers they're more for smoking smoking so the low and slow stuff like briskets and pulled pork you can achieve lower temperatures on the vertical smokers but you can't really get those sear marks that you can with the barrel style smokers so that's something to take into consideration what you're looking for in a pellet smoker but that's pretty much it so you got your hopper you got your auger tube you have your firebox and then you have your cooking chamber and now you understand how a pellet smoker works now i know the first thing you're going to want to do when you assemble your brand new smoker is to throw meat in and enjoy low and slow barbecue but there's one thing you got to do first and that's called the burn off now if you want to see how the burn off works i'll drop a link to where you can basically see how to properly do a burn off on your smoker but before you put food inside you basically set your smoker to 350 400 and you let it run for one hour and what that does is it burns off all the shipping residue and oils that were basically left from the manufacturing plant and then being shipped you're going to want to burn all that off and then once it cools down your smoker is ready to go now there is nothing more frustrating than having your smoker turn off because of an error code and the most common type of error code that your pellet smoker will give you is an overheating error code more commonly known as the erh code that is basically saying that your smoker had a certain temperature it was trying to maintain and now it's gone too high above that set temperature and out of risk of you know your smoker catching fire it shuts itself off so that the basically the fire can die now the frustrating thing about that is if you have brisket on and you're trying to do a super long cook and your smoker overheats you basically have to let your smoker turn off and then completely cool down before turning it back on again and that is a waste of time by about an hour so there's nothing more frustrating but there's a few things that you can do to help prevent getting an erh code the number one thing is actually right on top of your smoker this is basically your smoke stack now in the manual it will tell you that you can pretty much raise it and lower it but it really doesn't go into why you need to raise and lower it it helps to control smoke and airflow that's inside your smoker now when you're smoking something at like 150 degrees it's just on smoke setting the smoke itself really doesn't get too hot so this can actually be low you're going to want to trap a lot of that heat and smoke inside your cabinet so whether you're doing you know smoked cheese or sausage something that involves a really low smoke setting yes have this down but when you're trying to crank the temperature probably above 275 and up you're going to want to start opening this top stack up the reason why is you're actually trapping a lot of your heat inside your smoker if i'm cooking something at 350 400 degrees i have this top stack all the way open so what it's doing is basically just letting all that heat transfer up and out if this were to be lower what it's doing is it can't get enough heat out fast enough and then it basically trips itself and gives you an erh code so rule of thumb if it's 200 or below you can basically have this thing down but anything pretty much above 250 for me i just open it all the way up and just i've never had that issue now you're going to want to get into the habit of cleaning out your burn pot often me personally usually right before i cook i'll just take a shop back i'll go in and clean out the burn pot i'll actually show you right now how that's done usually right before a cook or right after the cook i'll basically take my shop back and then empty out the burn pot all right that's how you clean out the burn pot a clean smoker is a happy smoker you know less ash flying around in that smoker win-win now the last thing i want to go over is dealing with power trips no i'm not talking about your crazy boss i'm talking about when the power gets tripped and the smoker turns off now instinctively the device goes out your toaster goes out what do you do you plug it back in i want to get going but that's actually the most dangerous thing you can do for a pellet smoker and here's why when you plug your smoker back in your burn pot is already full of pellets and most of them are actually unburnt so when you plug your smoker back in it automatically starts filling as if you had just turned on your smoker it doesn't know that there's already pellets already in there so now what you have is an overflow of pellets and you have a lot of lot of smoke which pretty much acts as trapped gas and once they actually hit their ignition point boom that's how you can have your smoker actually explode on you because of all those trapped gases so if the power ever trips on mine what i do is leave it off take out the firebox covering it's going to be hot so you're going to want to use like really heavy duty gloves i'll basically go in there with like a spritzer bottle and basically spritz it down and wait for it to cool down then i'll take my shop back empty out the burn pot so that there's no more pellets in there you want to make sure everything is cooled down put back the burn pot covering you can set your smoker back up plug it back in turn it on and you should be ready to go all right guys that wraps up today's video i will leave you with one last tip and i'll just drop a link to that video and it's basically about sifting your pellets before they hit your hopper basically this product that i found on amazon and you basically put your pellets into the sifter and what it basically drops through the bucket is just the broken up pellets and the stuff that actually usually causes auger jams for me and ever since i started sifting my own pellets i haven't run into that issue so i will drop a link to that product so you can check it out that has definitely helped me out and because i've practiced all these things in this video i have yet to have one error code sent so i'm loving my pellet smoker i know you get made fun of a lot when you you know you enjoy the comfort and ease of a pellet smoker but again it is frustrating if you don't know how to use it right so i hope this information you found useful if you have any questions feel free to leave it in the comments i'm pretty good at responding but yeah if you're looking at getting a brand new smoker let me know in the comments what you're looking at um other than that hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed this video and i will catch you guys in the next one all right girl sergeant out oh hello if you like backyard grilling yes you hit the subscribe button hit the button oh you did it congratulations and welcome back

Channel: Grill Sergeant

Views: 489,331

Rating: 4.8605423 out of 5

Keywords: pellet smoker, pellet smoker fire management, pellet smoker tips, pellet smoker for beginners, pellet smoker temperature control, offset smoker for begginers, pellet smoker mistakes, pellet smoking for beginners, new to pellet smoking, how does a pellet smoker work, pellet grill, pellet smoker recipes, pellet grill turkey, offset smoker tips, pellet smoker tips and tricks, pellet smoker exploding, pellet smoker troubleshooting, troubleshooting pit boss pellet smoker

Id: o0kalLgf2AQ

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/wengelite]

Unless the lid on that stack is wildly different than mine it doesn't make any difference.

[u/segallsays]

I’m coming from an 820SC where I had way more smoke in my opinion. I’ve been at lower temps (180) with dampers all closed and still don’t feel like I’m getting much smoke in the grill section. Will try closing the vent caps more to see if that helps but open to any other suggestions! Thanks in advance!

[u/segallsays]

I’ve had an issue with my PH Lockhart not keeping enough smoke in to give it a good smokey flavor.