Afternoon people,
Received my Excel 20 , which is my first ever smoker, the other day and have spent the last few days getting pretty excited about giving it a go, and decided to jump in (probably stupidly) at the deep end by cooking a good pork shoulder this morning.
After lighting up my heat beads in a weber chimney until they were good and smouldering I then placed them in the bottom of the smoker filled the water bowl 3/4 with hot water and sealed it up. I left it alone for about twenty mins before checking on it and was only hovering around the 80-90 degree celcius range so decided to add some more heatbeads so that the charcoal tray had a good little stack at the bottom. The temperature seemed to rise to around 100c so I plonked in my meat and sealed it up has been cooking for 2 hours now (is gonna be a late night . ) but the temperature won't seem to get above 95c at the probe level.
Do I just go ahead and crack open another bag of the heat beads or am I doing something fundamentally wrong (which wouldn't surprise me at all). all vents are open to full whack right now.
I apologise for my grand ignorance and would be very grateful for any help you can provide.
Many thanks,
Shaky
(P.s. This is my first post here...so, Hello everyone!!)