Thanks for all the advice guys. It's all appreciated.
In then end, I decided to go ahead and buy a ProQ Frontier Elite over the Weber kettle. There were a few reasons for this but I won't bore you with the details...
Anyway, it arrived at the end of last week, so Sunday was spent putting it together and seasoning it, which was all pretty straight forward and had no problems with it.
I decided to smoke a chicken for experimental purposes rather than doing 'dry runs' as I was so excited
After seasoning it at very high temperature, I brought the heat down to 250f, and popped the chicken in (with a standard dry rub). Here was where I had the first problem. The coal just couldn't get hot again and after checking on it, I noticed that there wasn't a great deal of it left so I topped up with hot coal from the chimney which did the trick for a while... then the same problem, so I topped up again... and to cook the chicken from start to finish, I had used 3 lots of coal. I suppose I could've put a ton of coal to start with, but as I'm still in the learning process I don't want to waste coal and food.
As it happens, the chicken did come out absolutely fantastically well. So juicy and succulent. I received many compliments! I can't wait until the next go, which will probably be next weekend.
So far, I love the smoker minus a few problems. I don't think the thermometer is up to much, but I have ordered a Maverick and it's in the post so that'll solve that one. The highest door isn't shaped very well, and a fair amount of smoke was leaking from there so I will have to bend it a little to minimise the smoke and heat waste. And lastly, the vents are very tight and without the use of gloves they are impossible to adjust due to the heat so I have ordered welders gloves. Other than that, I am over the moon!
The only other problem I've encountered is the charcoal. I had read that lumpwood charcoal was the best for using so I bought a big bag from B&Q. However, the vast majority of the coal in the bag is very small. Too small in fact to fit into the charcoal basket so it just fell straight through. This is probably why I had to keep topping up the coal to maintain a decent heat.
So a couple of last questions for you is which coal is the best to buy, and if I put unlit coal into the basket, once it's been lit by the other coals, does this not produce too much dirty coal smoke rather than the nice wood smoke?
Cheers
Bryan