I am a newbie to smoking so I am reading this thread with interest.
I started with a hand me down New Braunfels offset smoker. Fire management was challenging and often the meat had harsh smoke flavor. Accordingly, we use it mainly as a grill.
I was then gifted a hand me down electric Masterbuilt cabinet smoker. It made some really good food, was a gateway to the hobby, but I hated having to load it with chips every 30-45 minutes and cleaning the drip pan was a mess.
I have since moved on to a Recteq RT1250. Things I like:
- It holds 40 lbs of pellets with a burn rate of about 1 lb/hr.
- Dual racks - I put a water pan on the lower rack as a shield to the drip pan and cook fat side up on the upper rack. To my untrained palate, I get plenty of smoke favor.
- I use the "Low" 180F setting for more smoke for the first several hours of the cooks.
- I upgraded to the competition cart as I store the smoker in my garage and wheel it to the patio for each use. The standard cart I don't think would have survived this.
- I bought the cold smoke box accessory. I have not used this much but want to make jerky.
- Customer service has been outstanding.
Things I don't like on the Recteq RT1250
- No way to easily empty the pellet hopper (ie - no dump chute).
- The upper grate is too high for large pork butts as they hit the top of the barrel. When cooking large butts, I support the upper rack on the water pan which drops it about 1.5" for added clearance.
- Taking it apart for cleaning is a pain. Remove the upper and lower grates, then remove the drip pan, then remove the heat deflector, then vacuum it all out. I have had some flame outs, back burn with smoke in the hopper, and an explosion (which blew off the door of the sold smoke box breaking the welds) so I have resorted to cleaning it prior to every cook and priming the pot with a handful of pellets
- The App for the I-phone is mostly ok. However, the graphing function can't deal with overnight cooks. So the graph works up to midnight. Wake up the next morning and you can still see the readings of the 2 probes but no graph from 12 am onwards. So I have to shut the smoker off, instantly restart it, then it resumes graphing from that point onward.
- I wish the App had a function where it can self ramp its temperature. For example, self change the set point from 180 to 225F when the probe temperature starts to plateau. I am not sure if any smoker has this.
