Flame Out Proceedure?

[BigDog]

Hello, I am new to pellet cooking can someone give me the procedure to follow if I run out of pellets, or have a flame out durring a cook?

Thanks

 

[Motodad1776]

Am I being a smart ass if I ask, "are you being serious?"

 

[Pacman]

In general, just adding more pellets solves the problem unless your firepit is dead out. Then you will probably want to re-prime the firepot with a small handful of pellets.

Assuming the notifications are working, you will get an alert that your pit temp is dropping with ample time to correct it.

One thing I do is set alarms on my Thermoworks air probe for high and low temp alarms just in case. I ran out of pellets once because I forgot to check before doing an overnight cook, but I got enough of a warning that my pit temp was dropping that I just filled the hopper and continued with the cook.

You should never see a flame out/burn out unless something is wrong with your gill like a clogged auger or other mechanical failure. It's never happened to me.

 

[BigDog]

Am I being a smart ass if I ask, "are you being serious?"

I have broad shoulders I am serious. The reason I ask is because I have seen a few videos of a certain brand pellet smoker blowing the lid off. I am not sure if I can just add more pellets with the door closed and let it do its thing or do I need to get into the burn pot and add pellets manually and wait for the burn to start. Maybe I am over thinking it?

 

[Pacman]

I have seen a few videos of a certain brand pellet smoker blowing the lid off.

There was an issue with the Recteqs for a bit. Plenty of scary videos and horror stories out there. I imagine other brands have similar issues.

The two takeaways on this is that Recteq allegedly upgraded their firmware to combat this, but the biggest correction was learned behavior not to turn a very hot grill off (350+) without stepping down the temperature to around 250 or lower before powering down. This "trial and error" approach has been documented thoroughly here and seemed to correct the "lid pop" detonations on start up due to an overloaded fire pot.

 

[Gonefishin]

If it were me running out of pellets. Fill hopper, start Auger in test mode, pull meat, pull grate, grease tray, and the heat shield. wait for pellets to pile up a bit in the fire box, stop auger, start the smoker and put everything back.

If I had the fire go out I’d suspect a pellet bridge and stir em up good, then do all the above but wait to start the auger till i could see it.

I’ve never had either issue.