remote smoke generation for cheese

[chezr]

Looking to smoke cheese in my FDA approved cheese making facility (sounds impressive but I am pretty small potatoes).  The smoking cabinet must be inside my facility.  I do not however want the entire facility smelling like my brother's BBQ restaurant.  Although I do not own a Bradley yet, my understanding is that I can detach the smoke generator and place it outdoors with a duct taking the smoke to the cabinet.  Can I also return that smoke outdoors and how much smoke am I going to end up with indoors.  Thanks

[Saber 4]

Some of our members have placed their Bradley's under a household kitchen exhaust hood in sheds and garages with little problems I would think if you put a Bradley with a cold smoke adapter under a commercial ventilation system you could do your cheese with little to no smoke getting away from the exhaust fans. Hopefully some of our members that have set up inside will come along to add to this or correct any mistakes I have made. Keep us posted on what you decide to do and how it works for us.

[tskeeter]

chezr, exhausting smoke using a kitchen vent fan works well for many people.  But, you could use the even more low tech approach that I use on the smoker that I have set up in a small shed.  I took the damper off of the vent assembly.  Got a connector at Home Depot that had tabs intended to be folded over and was the size of the smoker vent.  Cut away all but, I think, four of the tabs, and fitted the connector to the vent of my smoker.  Then I reached up into the vent from the inside of the smoker with a screw driver and folded the tabs against the side of the vent so the bent tabs locked the connector to the smoker.  From there, I added stove pipe to carry the smoke up through a hole I cut in the roof of the shed.  Put a boot and cap on the stove pipe and I was all set.  You don't have to go through the roof, exhausting the smoker through the wall of your building probably works even better because it is less likely to leak.  You'd have to cut a hole to exhaust the vent fan anyway, so why not avoid having to get electricity to the right place, etc., and try the un-powered approach first.  The only time I get smoke in the shed is when I open the door to the smoker in the middle of a smoke.  Since, with cheese, I'm not changing puck bowls, so I don't have any issues with smoke in the shed.  To help develop color, I leave the cheese in the smoker for a couple of hours after the Bubba Pucks have pushed the last biscuit off the puck burner.  During the time the cheese is just sitting, the smoke pretty sell clears from the smoker cabinet.  If you have problems with smoke remaining in the cabinet after a smoke, you could install a duct fan (from places like Grainger, McMaster-Carr, or MSC) in the exhaust duct to pull smoke out of the cabinet at the end of a smoke.

One of the advantages of using an un-powered vent process is that is prevents a vacuum from forming in your cheese making facility and pulling undesirable mold spores and the like into your building with the air that is replacing the air you have exhausted.  (I learned a little bit about air balance in dairy processing facilities while writing off $5,000,000 worth of mold contaminated yogurt.)  If your cheese making facility is designed as a positive air pressure environment, the positive pressure would help push smoke through the smoker cabinet and out the exhaust vent to the outside of the building.       

For pictures of several sheds and other smoking set ups that forum members use/have built, check out the threads in the Accessories forum.  I got quite a few ideas for my set up from what other folks had done.     

[beefmann]

welcome aboard, take a  look at my  set up, it may give you an idea on how to  set it up, i have my  smoker in a  shed and you  can  remove the smoke generator and  place it below the smoker ..  duct  up to the smoker and attach,  then  vent through the roof

http://forum.bradleysmoker.com/index.php?topic=17581.msg213170#msg213170

just one idea