Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Question for the BBQ experts

It is pretty big, but it does not seem to affect cooking times or flavour that I can tell. My times for the various things I've smoked roughly match what others experience for a given temperature.

There is no way I would have spent twice as much or more to try out smoking, so the GMG has worked out very well for me.

Chess, those BGE smokes look good. If I had the money, I'd probably still go for a BGE. Nothing beats it for versatility.

Depends on how long this 50 degree swing is maintained.

The BGE has been excellent but i gotta say there are a few things i would like different.
The Primo grills are oval in shape which in a lot of ways makes way more sense. Aside from burgers, how many things do you put on a round grill that fit really well?
Ribs, brisket, all fit way better on an oval or rectangular setup.

Price is another consideration. The quality is excellent for sure, but i've read many good things about the Big Steel Keg which sells for less.
Accessories could be a bit more reasonably priced as well. I feel like we pay Sony prices for the bbq if anything is stamped BGE on it.
We actually bought the BGE charcoal at the start and decided at $30/bag it was too expensive. The Cdn Tire Royal Oak sucks and is too low quality (lowest priced at $12/bag too).
The Maple Leaf has been our favorite so far but next time i'm going to try out the Weekend Warrior i think.

That Keg looks pretty good, I had forgotten about it. I didn't even know about it until after I picked up the GMG. Still outside my price range for a first time test drive.

Can't go wrong either way IMO. Right Tom?

Thomas from Maxzim wrote this >

I also spoke with Fred from axiom chat forum. He loves his Davy Crockett, but they do overshoot temperatures when warming up. The larger grills don't of course.

Fred my Daniel Boone hold temps very well without any problems... no overshoot at all, hope this helps

Oooh look! I gots new probe. Now, where should I put it?

I decided to stick with boring and put in in my smoker.

I've been meaning to pick up a secondary digital thermometer for a while now just to verify what temp. my smoker is really running at. I had read on several bbq forums that the manufacturer supplied thermometers could be out by varying amounts.

To check that I picked up a Thermoworks DOT. It seems to have a good rep for reliability and accuracy. I checked last night and my DOT shows 109 at the boiling point, so it reads 3 degrees low.

I'm happy to say that the thermometer in my smoker is quite accurate. In fact, a little closer to true temp than my DOT. I set the meat probe on the grill and watched the two during the smokers start up. The GMG temp. consistently showed 2 degrees warmer than my DOT, so it is only 1 degree out from true temp. If you actually adjust for altitude (1000 ft.) its bang on!

So, what's going on in the GMG is interesting and suggests some clever engineering. The temperatures reported by the cooking chamber probe range quite a bit more than the air temperature at the grill.

I did my test at a 195 F set temperature. The outside air was at 52 F (damned tropical for this time of year!!)

The Chamber probe ranged as much as 50 degrees between cycles while the max air temp swing was 20 degrees with most cycles varying around 7 degrees.

One thing the geek in me noticed is that there were temperature swings even when the grill was not feeding pellets and the largest temperature swing was during a pellet feed cycle.

[FullGeekOn]
I have been wondering how they figure out the proper feed rates for pellets given that you could be running this grill in anything from sub zero to very hot days. My guess is that they do that by monitoring the chamber probe as they vary fan cycles. As long as there are pellets in the chamber they use changes in fan speed to bring the temperature back up when it falls below a certain level.

If that does not work and the temp keeps dropping, the auger starts feeding pellets and the fan kicks up a notch or two until the temperature starts to rise.

It is during the pellet feed cycles that the larger swings happen.

I'm guessing you could actually infer outside temperature (80F vs -15 F) by the rate of change at the chamber probe during heating cycles and vary your feed rate. I don't know if that would actually be needed though.
[/GeekOff]

Long story short, it appears that the temperature variation is actually much less than I thought with a max swing of 20 F during only some of the heating cycles and most swings below 10 F.

You were waiting for a reply and were not patient enough to hear the potential responses in due time.
Oh so many possibilities here Fred...

This is not unexpected Fred and i believe your assessment is fairly accurate. In any 'feedback' system in which i've designed tests over the years, this is how they work.
Parameter falls to certain threshold and feedback system reacts by pumping resources in to bring the parameter back above the threshold.
How quickly and accurately it does this is certainly the key.

Nice to know though that your system is more accurate than you thought. A 50F swing in temps is alot depending on how long this situation exists. Knowing that the swing is even less is a real plus.
Definitely a bit of a drawback with a pellet fed system i suppose.

On the FYI front, we are considering doing a brisket for a New year's dinner, along with a fondue components.
Of course the brisket would be done on the BGE all day long so if we go that route, i'll post pics over the day on the progress.

Unlike a few winters ago when i was outside doing a pulled pork butt, my beer was freezing in the -30C weather, whereas this year we're sitting at a balmy -5C on average so far in December.
It should be a bit more pleasant to step outside and check the beef basting in progress.

Double post