If your name is anderson... I will shut up.
Hey! I like you bud... its my way of showing brethren love! LOL I will debate merits when you give some. :wink:
Less you made that nifty computerized thing for Scott at Lighthouse ministries.
I just wanted to make it clear that there is NO measurable increase in creosote by using the Stoker and all wood. It was a dubious claim, we have many that use it that are familiar with running it with straight wood on a myriad of pits with no problem so.... I was debating based on the merits or lack thereof and still from what I see, you have not used a STOKER, which I have, and is Vastly different from the damper system on a Oyler (My personal Favorite Machine of all time) which I have used.
Seriously, you are alright in my book. Just wrong on this, and its not an opinion... Stokers, when used correctly, do not create creosote smoke which will ruin BBQ.
Well, all-right, brother. This is about the third time you have tried to dismiss me by magnanimously informing me that I'm wrong, based on your accumulated experience, tonnage, word count, ALL CAPS, etc. Enjoy your world. Or, tell me where I'm wrong:
How the controls work:
- Fact: A stoker controls pit temp by regulating air to the fire to control its power output. While there are some clever algorithms to minimize overshoot and undershoot, the basic principal is this: when the pit temp is below the setpoint, the fan runs, and when the pit temp is above the setpoint, the fan stops.
- Facts: When the fan stops, air is reduced and pit temp declines.
- Conclusion: Pit temp declined because combustion was reduced.
Something (or a portion of something) that was burning when the fan was running stopped burning when the fan turned off. That's the only way power went down, right?
How wood works:
- Fact: When wood is heated, it decomposes into charcoal (basically carbon) and smoke (a cornucopia of volatile organic compounds).
- Fact: Charcoal burns in a surface reaction as a glowing ember. Restricting air slows the oxidation and reduces the heat produced with no ill effects: the unburned fuel just sits there waiting for some oxygen to come along later.
- Fact: Smoke burns as a flame. Restricting air also slows this reaction and reduces the heat produced. But in this case the unburned fuel is a vapor and heads straight for the cooking chamber and your meat.
- Fact: The production of smoke is a function of the rate of decomposition of wood, which is driven by the rate of heating of the logs. In the short-term (seconds/minutes), smoke production is unaffected by changes in air.
It's safe to say that when the fan cycled off, smoke production didn't magically decrease in proportion to the reduction in air.
When the fan cycles off, both combustion processes experience reduced air. Both reaction rates decline, reducing total power and pit temperature. And by definition, if the power of the smoke combustion declines, you are sending uncombusted smoke to the cookbox, because the smoke fuel is still coming at the same rate from the hot logs and you are now burning less of it due to having less air. If you still had enough air to burn all the smoke (via leaks, etc.), power would not decrease, right? But it does. Sorry.
That these things lead to unburned smoke in the cookbox is not debatable - they do. If they didn't, they'd have no control of the power level. You can't burn more than 100% of the smoke produced, so you control below 100%.
If the pit boss keeps the fire size slightly bigger than needed to maintain temp unassisted, the system will burn most of the smoke and little creosote will be produced. If the fire is twice as big as it needs to be, half of the smoke will make it out of the firebox unburned. The paradox here is that the closer the pit boss maintains the fire size to the heat demand, the lower the utility of the device in the first place.
If you use wood as a fuel with these devices, or any other air-restricting control, to try to increase your unattended interval, you will pay for it in progressively dirtier smoke. It's only a question of degree. Measuring creosote is mostly a subjective thing. While we've all had a black hunk of nasty Q, there are a thousand shades between that and zero. And some people like a touch of it. Wood creosote is the flavoring agent in Liquid Smoke, and they sell a lot of that stuff, right?
Maybe you can get to 4 hours unattended without impacting flavor too much for your eaters. Good for you. But don't kid yourself - all of the logs in that 4-hour load you shoved in the firebox will heat up simultaneously and emit a huge spike in smoke around the 1-2 hour period as they decompose into charcoal. There's nothing you can do to keep that genie in the bottle - the smoke is coming out on its own terms, not the stoker's. And unless the pit saw a corresponding spike in temperature, you know a big portion of that smoke peak wasn't burned.
This isn't armchair theorizing, although I've done my homework, including inspecting pits and interviewing pit bosses at nearly a hundred joints in TX and KC over the last 8 years. Most of these guys were certain that they were right. Most were very experienced. Most had many tons under their belt. But while some of them made great Q, others were terrible (and a few of them are terribly $uccesful, BTW). Why do you suppose that is?
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