Et tu Oklahoma Joe? What I thought was going to be a long and happy relationship has turned sour way too fast. After maybe 4-5 briskets, a couple of beer can chickens, and a week's worth of yummy steaks, I am in the middle of some real technical problems with my pellet grill. It has been almost two months and I guess the bloom is off the rose.
I don't know what really happened, Saturday I ran the grill for almost eleven hours making a brisket that was high on hopes (it was a "grass fed" brisket that cost more than the regular ones), but low on meaty goodness, well, it was good but not great. There were no problems then and the weather did not change that much between Saturday and Monday, that I know of. I tried turning it on Monday morning and after 5-10 minutes the grill was making a scary amount of smoke. I got nervous enough to just go out and shut it off. After it cooled, I discovered a simple problem. I had too much ash in the ash box and I guess it sits right below the burn "cup" and it too had filled with ash. My guess is that the pellets were being forced into the burn cup and were lit but the ash was smothering the oxygen, so they burned and smoked but couldn't really get hot to increase the temperature. I noticed with the setting on high, where it should reach 600 degrees, it was barely at 118. I went out there with my garage vacuum and sucked out all the ash and loose pellets and called it a day.
I went out there today, thinking it would be alright now and I find the auger won't feed pellets. I tried a couple things including using a metal hanger wire and pushing it through the auger space to try and loosen jammed pellets but had no luck. I then looked on Youtube and figured out how to dismantle the auger which I did. It was very jammed, I even hit the auger with a hammer to get it to release. After I pulled it out, it seemed to go back in easily. I re-assembled everything and saw the auger turn a couple times before loading pellets again, but then it wouldn't heat. I figured the auger was not turning after I put pellets in the hopper. I took it apart again and this time I made sure there was nothing in the auger tube by shoving a broom stick all the way through. At this point I ran out of time as I had to go drop off Baby Jesus at football practice, so I will continue messing with it tomorrow.
Wife and I had talked about taking a break from briskets this weekend but I had started using the grill last week to make our lunches Monday through Friday and it was such a great week, food wise. I had some fine New York strips for today, but they had to go on the skillet instead. I will figure it out, I love the grill, my boys gave it to me for my birthday. Looks like I can order a replacement motor if I have to, but first I want to mess around with this one, it shudders when I put the knob on a temperature setting, it just doesn't turn.
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