First Cook With New Fan Mod

[JZ]

Today I had my first cook with the new fan mod. The fan blade is the 2" Grainger blade posted in the fan mod link but I stacked 2 blades on the inside of the smoker instead of having one. I posted some test run results earlier but those were with an empty box.

Here are the results after doing an 8 lb batch of sticks.

First pic is of the meat going into the smoker showing the location of the PID probe. I put the second therm probe in later and it was located about 2" above the top of the meat in the top rack (sorry didn't get the pic).



The second pic is of the sticks coming out. It may be difficult to see but the ends were cooked more than than the middle.



The "test run" was flawed though. Firstly because it was really windy almost all day and sometimes the wind would blow so hard that the smoke would blow back out of where the SG connects to the cab. To make a really long story short I will say that the temps between the top of the cab and the bottom were typically within about 12*. But I had some instances where they were almost 30*. This seemed to be drastically affected by where the probes were placed. After about 8 hrs I thought I had it all figured out and got the bottom and top probes reading within 4* of each other (just by placing the probes closer to the meat) and then for no apparent reason and without moving the probes or PID temp changes the upper probe temp just started dropping again.

The big picture results are that the fan moves air around the cab but not enough to avoid rotating racks. I noted that the edges and the ends of each rack were cooked more than the middle. It seemed more important to move the sticks from the middle of the rack to the outside than to move the racks from top to bottom; although I did both. There did not seem to be a big difference between the top and bottom rack as they seemed to cook at about the same rate.  I also noted that the back of the bottom rack did not seem to be overly hot and did not burn the sticks (again I did rotate the racks). The fan mod is certainly an improvement but it will not eliminate the need to rotate racks IMHO. Hope this helps others.

[wipf9994]

I just put a fan in my smoker as well and i'm wondering if the fan is supposed to go cw or ccw. It's pulling air back instead of blowing right now.

[mikecorn.1]

Here is a recent thread with lots of info
Fan Mod Help


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[viper125]

I think and this is my opinion with out any facts other then what ive seen. We can average temps all we want but I think the metal sides are giving off radiant heat. This along with cabinet temps cook meat closer to the walls. Or all the metal in the bottom (v-tray and all) So i think that totally even cooking is kind of a thing that cant be done. Maybe rotating trays is just part of the process after all this has never been a set and play type hobby even if the Bradley doe's take a way a lot of work.