Trying to smoke my home made sausage in my Bradey Original Smoker today. I wanted the cabinet to be between 120-140 degrees. In the past I have had a lot of trouble maintaining a steady temp ... cabinet always seems to slowly climb into undesired temperature range, so today I took special care. I started my smoker early and waited until it seemed stable at 125' ... I had previously air dried my sausage for about an hour and a half with fan before putting them briefly in a very low temp over to warm them up a bit beyond room temp rather than having them in the smoker for an hour at 110 to dry cause that would make stabilizing the cabinet temp prior to smoking too difficult.
Then I put them in my supposedly stable smoker and began to apply smoke ... of course the cabinet temp had fallen while I put the sausages in but I did not adjust the temp and watched it ever so slowly creep back up .. so far so good. I was confident THIS time was going to be cake ... so I went away for 20 minutes ... when I came back the temp was 150 and climbing .. huh? I am using 2 separate probe thermometers to monitor the temp ... one with a wire hung through the vent to just above the sausage .. they are on the 3 lower racks and a fixed probe inserted also through the vent but measure the temp at the top of the cabinet ..
Turned the heat down .. still kept climbing .. turned it down again and opened the door .. still kept climbing ... eventually after any repeats of the above procedure ... I turned the cabinet heat off entirely. Temp finally stabilized at 145 -150 ... which is ok I guess BUT it's 3'C outside ... that's very nearly freezing and I am still running hot with the cabinet off ... what am I going to do in the summer? I bought this unit so I could enjoy home smoked sausage year round .. I thought it was reliable.
Seems to me there must be a problem ... I have only had the smoker since last summer but I've smoked about 6 large batches of sausage and about as many pulled porks as well as a few trial with turkey, cheese etc so it's well used ... I don't remember the temps running this hot initially but it's been an issue for some time and I have to monitor it VERY closely if I want to make sure things are proceeding according to plan ... maybe I just didn't notice it in the beginning cause I was new to smoking.
Does the smoke generating heat source make that much heat? I've been having an issue with the temperature selector not seeming to engage (light doesn't go on) until it's almost all the way to the right (fully on) but since I have turned it off completely at this point that isn't what's causing the current problem ... unless the cabinet heat is still on ... even though the light is out and the slider is off? Not sure what to do.
