Pitmaster adjustment suggestions

[gordinho]

Hi, in the past my slow longer cooks have been more stable but today it's full of big swing oscillations. You can see that I'm aiming for 225F and basically the PID setup is too slow at recovering as the temperature is going down. I think partially this may be how I setup the coals, they're a bit smaller today and on top of some apple wood but I'm wondering if you have any advice in terms of tweaking the PID settings.

When I look at it, it almost seems like that when the fan kicks in, it puts a lot of cold air in the kamado jr, so I guess perhaps having a low speed intake would help in this case

Cheers!

 

[s.ochs]

Hi! The ember bed seems to be very large, it takes a very long time to cool down on its own and heats up quickly again in a very short time. This means that the range of controllability is very small. how wide is the exhaust air still open? can this be closed even further?

 

[gordinho]

Hi! I will further close down the exhaust, it was perhaps a bit still too open.

You don't think I was pushing too much air with the fan? This is on a Kamado joe Junior, the small one. The fact that the rate of temperature decrease is higher when the fan kicks is makes me think I should lower the fan speed, which I ended up doing (lower DCMax) and I think it helped a bit. Next time I will try and light up only the center but invariably it will expand. Sometimes I use bigger chunks of charcoal, I think that also helps make things more predictable.