Hi all. Long time lurker, first time poster.
Just received my BS today, and followed the instructions of 'Seasoning Method'.
It said to smoke the tower for 1-2 hours. I put 3 bisquettes into the feed tube and fired up that puppy.
1 hour later, I opened the door, only to find the bowl with only water (no bisquettes in there)... The one bisquette on the burner is now ashes, the 2nd in line is charred, leaving black burnt residue on the tray. 3rd bisquette is untouched!
Looking at the aftermath, the mechanism and the diagram... it seems like I will always have to load the number of bisquettes + 2 extra. Is that correct?
i.e. if I want to smoke for 2 hours, I would need to load 6+2=8 bisquettes.
TIA
No not quite correct, but close. What many of us use are bubba pucks to get around this. Go here: Chez House Of Smoke (http://www.chezbubba.com/cart/index.html) and then to Accessories. Look for the bubba pucks. Now that pack is only 2 so call him and tell him you want 3 pucks--I wish he would just adjust the package. You will place these three pucks on top of your wood pucks. The number is on this page: Phone Number Is At Bottom Of This Page. (http://www.chezbubba.com/)
BTW congrats on picking a great smoker. You will really enjoy it.
Olds
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Sleepy,
Congradulations on your new arrival. [:D] Oldman is absolutly correct about the bubba pucks. I just use 2 bubba pucks and put a regular puck behind the 2 bubba pucks. Works like a charm. [;)] We will be looking forward to your future posts about your smoking experiances on the BS
Mike C
Thanks guys. Placed an order. Hope to smoke some meat this weekend!
I also purchased a couple of Bubba Pucks too. I'm glad I did. It's nice not having to deal with partially burned pucks.
Chez's wife talked me out of buying three, saying it wasn't needed. So I took her advice and glad I did. The main reason I'm glad I didn't the third is the weight of the pucks. I was suprised by how heavy they were when I took them out of the package. While the weight of the pucks has no noticeable effect on the operation of the smoke generator, I did notice a big difference in the amount of wood particles that were accumulated in the bisquette hopper after each use since using the pucks. And I do clean the smoke generator thoroughly after each use.
The main reason for this is the weight of the metal pucks cause more pressure to be applied to the bisquettes below them, which in turn causes the bisquettes to rub harder against each other when one is being pushed into the smoker, thus causing wood particles to be scraped off.
This may never be a problem. I haven't had my smoker long enough to find out. But I was just concerned that the more wood particles there were deposited in the hopper the more chance there was for them clog to things up.
So what I did was drill a 1-1/2" hole out of the center of each puck which reduced their weight and still maintained their strength. As far as the third puck goes, I cut a duplicate one out of a piece of scrap oak I had laying around and that way I didn't have to use a bisquette.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing Bubba Pucks because they are definately the way to go. I just wanted mine a little lighter so I made a small modification.
Bubbagump