I had a smothered fire in my unit while cooking pizza. I emptied the pot of some of the pellets and then used a blow torch to get it going. Finished the cook and thought nothing of it.
The next morning I noticed that there were wisps of smoke coming out of the hopper. Looked, and sure enough, I had a smoldering of pellets. I emptied the hopper via the chute and found that maybe 10% were trying to light.
Turned on the unit, set the hht to 15 to empty the auger and bottom of hopper and cleanup any problem and prevent any long term damage. To my surprise the auger ran from about a minute and then stopped and did not restart, all other items worked; ie. blower igniter etc. This scenario repeated itself every time and caused some real concern.
Talked with Cookshack service and got a new controller on the way.
Installed the new controller and, much to my surprise, it did the same thing. Again spoke with Cookshack service and found out that there is an undocumented startup procedure in the unit. When it is first turned on, the unit feeds pellets for the first 64 seconds of the cycle; it then stops feeding pellets for the next 191 seconds to allow the igniter time to start the pellets and not overfill the fire pot, it then resumes it feed cycle. For all you geeks out there, they use an 8 bit counter to derive the cycle.
It makes sense but, if you don’t know about it, it is scary. I need to use the unit this weekend and was looking at contingency plans.
Thanks to Billy and Tony in the service group for their help and assistance.
Mack
Smoke'n Ice
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