Hello,
For Christmas i received a BBQ Guru Party Q temperature controller that i could use with my WSM. I was all excited and attempted to test it out this past weekend with a pork shoulder. I live in the New England area so the temps were pretty cold this time of year. This past weekend we were in the single digits with a wind chill probably far below that. The problems i ran into was with a battery drain.
I got the unit installed fine, and it performed well while it was working. It kept my pit temp within plus or minus 10 degrees. But the batteries it came with died out after only two hours of use. So i thought, well maybe these are old batteries, and i put in a new set of 4 so that i could let it run over night. Overnight cooks are the main reason we purchased this. I woke up in the morning to find the controller stopped working after 2 more hours of use (it died around 2:30am), the fire went out, and the meat temp dropped down to 50 degrees. I ended up letting the shoulder finish in the oven. I brought the controller back inside, after a while of letting it come to room temp, i fired it up again to see what would happen. It fired right up and started blowing air... no battery light warnings.
My question is, is this expected behavior? Does the cold weather have a significant impact on AA batteries? Is there another product that might perform better for me in the cold weather? Have been looking at some of the competitors, but the thing i liked about the Party Q was its simplistic design. You plug it in, set your temp, and forget it. I have a call open with support but so far they haven't been very helpful. There isn't anything in the documentation on what temperature this product is rated to run in... If it had said anything about performance problems in cold weather i would have likely looked at something else. Something i should probably also add is the fan wasn't constantly running as the support person was thinking. It was only on when keeping the pit within temp.
For Christmas i received a BBQ Guru Party Q temperature controller that i could use with my WSM. I was all excited and attempted to test it out this past weekend with a pork shoulder. I live in the New England area so the temps were pretty cold this time of year. This past weekend we were in the single digits with a wind chill probably far below that. The problems i ran into was with a battery drain.
I got the unit installed fine, and it performed well while it was working. It kept my pit temp within plus or minus 10 degrees. But the batteries it came with died out after only two hours of use. So i thought, well maybe these are old batteries, and i put in a new set of 4 so that i could let it run over night. Overnight cooks are the main reason we purchased this. I woke up in the morning to find the controller stopped working after 2 more hours of use (it died around 2:30am), the fire went out, and the meat temp dropped down to 50 degrees. I ended up letting the shoulder finish in the oven. I brought the controller back inside, after a while of letting it come to room temp, i fired it up again to see what would happen. It fired right up and started blowing air... no battery light warnings.
My question is, is this expected behavior? Does the cold weather have a significant impact on AA batteries? Is there another product that might perform better for me in the cold weather? Have been looking at some of the competitors, but the thing i liked about the Party Q was its simplistic design. You plug it in, set your temp, and forget it. I have a call open with support but so far they haven't been very helpful. There isn't anything in the documentation on what temperature this product is rated to run in... If it had said anything about performance problems in cold weather i would have likely looked at something else. Something i should probably also add is the fan wasn't constantly running as the support person was thinking. It was only on when keeping the pit within temp.