FEC Stuck at 258 - 262 - Ideas?

Many folks here may be traveling,etc for the holiday.

Best to call CS service right now and get correct advice,rather than waiting around for our assorted wild guesses.

Already did. The contact it sends you to for CS is out till early Dec and the operator hasn't answered. Does anyone have a contact for someone else?

Try Bill Vice at 580-765-3669.

He's at lunch so I'll figure out the problem later today after we eat. Thanks for passing on his name and number Trucky1008.

Yep,Bill will stay on the phone with you while you tear the whole sysyem apart and troubleshoot it.

As a follow up, the ribs turned out great with two racks finishing 10 min early, 2 on time, and then two more a half hour later. I decided to keep the smoker running, set it to 300 and looky there, it shot up to 300 degrees when I checked it a half hour later.

I just got off the phone with Bill and he was really helpful. He's thinking the relay is the issue to he's sending one out for me. Great service and I guess that's one more thing to the long list of things I love about this smoker.

I want to follow up what happened with my FEC so that others could perhaps use what I learned.

My FEC was taking forever to come up to temp. When loaded with two briskets and two butts it would get stuck around 228 or so and if I just let it run empty I would only be around 260. When I watched the fire pot, I thought the fan wasn't working properly because the flames weren't nearly as high as they were in the past. It was acting as if only the low fan was on.

I spoke with CS and at first they sent a fan relay and that seemed to help one weekend, in hindsight, I had used pellets that were broken into smaller pieces so there was more fuel. The next weekend I ended up going to a double header comp and the darn thing wouldn't recover quickly or get to temp. We ended up cooking our entire cook at a lower temp than what we liked for both days. It didn't kill us but it did affect us.

I got home and called Tony w/ CS and all the electronics checked out perfectly and we couldn't figure it out since every single thing was working perfectly. He mentioned the pellets and sure enough I had been using a new brand of pellets that weekend. He also mentioned that perhaps the stainless steel pot would work better than the cast iron one so he sent one out to me. I went to install it and when I removed the old fire pot there was a large amount of ash that was piled up right under the pot. B I N G O! I cleaned it out, put the old fire pot back in and set it to 400 and let it rip. It performed perfectly just like day 1.

My issue came up since I transport it on it's side with the exhaust side down. This caused all the ash to build up right under the pot. It's also due to never vacuuming the pot. In the future, I'm just going to remove the pot every 3 months and clean the ash.

quote:

Originally posted by AZScott:
... when I removed the old fire pot there was a large amount of ash that was piled up right under the pot. B I N G O! I cleaned it out, put the old fire pot back in and set it to 400 and let it rip. It performed perfectly just like day 1...

Great point. With the large holes (depending on which pot) I hadn't even considered that as an issue. I vacuum mine out pretty much after every cook and haven't seen that problem.

THANKS for coming back and posting, we'll add it to our arsenal of what to check.

I swapped the cast iron pot for the steel one too after many issues with flareouts, etc. Not an issue since. I’ve since conducted many overnight smokes at low temps (145-160) right on the money, no flare-outs—A world of difference.

When I used to have the cast iron one, I would reach in the cold pot and get the ashes out with my fingers, as I was too lazy to drag our big 12 gallon shop vac all the way thru the house to do the task.

About the time I changed pots, I bought a 2.5 gal shopvacl at sears and it sets in the living room closet, easiest thing in the world. I did notice (before) every time i disassembled the firebox, there was a lot of ashes down in there. My guess is, I was pushing the ashes in the air holes as I was trying to scoop them out with my fingers.

The holes in the fire pot seem to plug the more the smoker is used and a good cleaning has worked wonders for me. Glad you figured it out Scott.