# Traeger Mod to prevent jammed pellets



## doyles (Feb 28, 2015)

I am new to the forum and have a Traeger Texas Pellet Smoker.

After reading about some people having pellets left in their auger that swelled and jammed the Auger I began looking at some possible solutions.

One person purchased a $20 Bucket Head shop vac from Home Depot just to remove all of the pellets out of the the pellet tank.  The vac is only used for pellets and so no dirt contamination.   I liked this idea and it makes it easy to then switch to different woods.  

However, it still leaves the Auger full.  It seems like an easy mod would be to put a switch in series with the heater element so that you can actually turn the heater off while the auger continues to run and dump pellets into the firebox which can then be easily vacuumed out.  

Any thoughts on this??

Thanks,

Doyle


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## seenred (Feb 28, 2015)

I'm no electrician, but that seems reasonable...let us know how it works!  Thumbs Up

And welcome to the forums!

Red


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## bvogt (Mar 9, 2015)

Let me know how this works for you, I just got my Treager last month and I'm concerned when summer gets hear with the humidity I run into issues if pellets are left in the auger.

Thanks

Bob


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## doyles (Mar 9, 2015)

I looked at a number of the wires underneath the Pellet box but so far have not identified the heater wire.  It may be going directly to the control board.    I did find another thing that was causing some temperature variation.  The concrete deck that the Traeger was sitting had a very small slope (water drainage) and if the Traeger was sitting so that the pellet box was on the high side of the slope then pellets would come out of the auger and roll to the opposite side without igniting until there were a lot of pellets in the box.  This in turn caused a much hotter fire when they all ignited.  Solution was to turn the Traeger so that pellets coming out of the auger fell immediately to the heater and ignited right away.  I also did not like the way the thermocouple was up right next to the left wall.  Any breeze at all would mean that wall was slightly cooler and give a slightly low temperature reading which then caused the Traeger to heat more resulting in higher that set temps according to an internal thermocouple and the dial thermometer.  Bending that Thermocouple towards the grill and slightly away from that wall helped fix the problem.


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## daveomak (Mar 9, 2015)

Pictures would help us mechanically challenged....


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## daveomak (Mar 9, 2015)

TRAEGER         2015-03-09.jpg



__ daveomak
__ Mar 9, 2015


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## doyles (Mar 9, 2015)

Thanks Dave,

That diagram helps a lot.  I will give a quick try just unplugging the Purple/White wires to the Hot Rod and if those are the right ones then I will look at best way to interrupt that connection to allow the auger to run all of the pellets into the firebowl with the heater off.


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## daveomak (Mar 9, 2015)

I think if you jump the red wire to another hot wire the auger should run.....  then you can put a momentary or on/off toggle in there....


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