Temperature problems.
Posted: 28 Mar 2010, 13:53
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!!)
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!!)