FEC arrived but not working

If you have the door open to watch the firepot, your temperature indicator is measuring the ambient temperature and calling for more heat/pellets, to heat the unit ...

Try shutting down for a while, cleaning out the firepot, and restarting with the door closed for a while to see if temperature builds to the setpoint after initial start cycle. If this does not solve the problem, contact CS service.

Regards,
Stephen - NoCents

Stephen is right. That man knows what he is talking about.
Bill

Call Stewart and get a good controller...

I had the door closed. I could hear the pellets falling into the firepot. Also, if I understand correctly, the smoke setting works on time only. It should feed pellets for about 5 seconds per minute, not every 5-10 seconds. I am fortunate enough to still have my Traeger and I will try the controller from it. I am pretty sure that the FEC uses the same controller.
This should give me some information to tell customer service when I call.

Mike

Call Tony ,in service,and let him handle.

Tom-Fl

Sounds like it's not igniting.

Did you turn it on for 3 min then turn it off and then restart? If the firepot is empty and you clean it out, there won't be enough pellets to start if the igniter goes out (3 min) before enough pellets get it. I just toss a small handful into the pot and go straight to 180.

Or the igniter is not working.

Since you couldn't call CS if you got it late in the day, just call them today.

I think that I have it fixed. I took out the controller and hooked up an old Traeger 3 speed controller and it seemed to work OK. I hooked up the original controller again and after a bit of tweaking, it fired up and came to temperature. I let it run at 315 for a couple of hours to season it and then shut it down and cleaned it out. After letting it cool off, I fired it up at the 180 setting. It lit right up and went to temp. The only thing that I can think of is that possibly one of the plugs came loose during shipping, and when I took it apart and put it back, I made better connections. I have 2 racks of baby backs in it now for my first cook. I am excited. Thanks everyone for the suggestions and support.

Mike

after ten years with Traegers I don't even care about the auto start.I just took delivery of two FEC's the auto start is dead in one, but the controller holds temp perfect. No way i am trading that one in. It is SO EASY to just squirt a little Bright Stove gel onto a small pile pellets. In the FEC there is no grease shelf to take out. Just open the door. The one that I start manualy is up to temp faster than auto start.

No Tom Tony is out of Town this week.

Craig

Yes, but Stuart will answer in place of Tony.

Before I fixed my unit, I also discussed the trouble that I was having on the Smoke Ring Forum. This got a discussion going about the reliability of the thermostat control board used in the FEC. There seems to be a general perception that these boards fail often. I think that the perception is distorted since one person who had troubles is a high profile person in the BBQ world. How common is this failure? I would not have bought my FEC if I thought it was serious. Last summer, the feed auger on my small Traeger quit working after 14 hours of cooking in the hot sun. It turned out to be a bad connection in one of the controller plugs which is the same problem that I had with my new FEC. Maybe these plugs are more of a problem than the circuit board itself. Has anyone tried cutting them out and soldering the wires together? Would this void the warantee?

Any modification to the unit will void the warranty. But if you want to know for sure, you'll have to ask CS (I'm not CS)

Well, don't think many, if any of the people in that forum OWN FE's. Like a lot of internet stuff, it's "well I heard..." Now the confusion can be if they're just talking about Traeger controllers used in Traegers, vs talking about FE's.

Same with the thermostat, haven't heard that many controllers going bad. More about what temps are on the controllers than them failing.

Main failure I hear is the igniter, but it's usually have a high temp fire caused by grease or other factors (I had that problem and replaced by igniter in about 10min)

I'm in that forum too, but only in a couple of places, like the competition forum. Guess I'll have to pay attention.

Appreciate the heads up.

Sorry, I did not mean that forum. The one I am talking about is the e-mail based one that is moderated by Garry Howard. There are a few FEC owners on that one, but one well respected member got a lemon and this seemed to influence a lot of people.

Thanks for the details.

There is a smokering Forum for posting, are you talking about a mailing list that comes in email only?

Is that one well respected member in this forum? If not, invite him in. I love it when people have issues, but don't contact the company to resolve the issues.

It is called "The Official Smoke Ring BBQ List" and their url is: http://www.bbq-porch.org/
It is available in email format or by archives.
Actually, this member had good things to say about Cookshack's customer service. He said that they were very nice and tried very hard to resolve his problems, but since he runs a restaurant as well as several other ventures, he did not have time to deal with it and went back to the way he had been cooking. He returned the unit and they refunded his money.

Well if he didn't have time to fix it and he got a money back guarantee, can't say more than that.

Be interested to know who it was.