# MES30 Shut off problem



## pbrown86 (Apr 21, 2016)

Hello,

  I have a MES 30 (20070411).  I have only had it about a year (about a dozen smokes).  I have had an issue since early on, but it seems to have become more common.  When I turn on the smoker via the control panel, it sometimes will turn off and there will be a "clicking sound".  If I unplug and replug it in, it will turn back on, but when trying to program the temp and time, sometimes it will repeat with shutting off and the clicking sound.  My best luck has been to unscrew the control panel and let it sit on the top of the smoker but not screwed in and not "hooked" into the top with the guiding screw on the bottom of the control panel.   This will normally allow it to work as long as I don't touch the controls once it has started.  Any recommendations?


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## chef jimmyj (Apr 21, 2016)

Sounds like an intermittent short or beak in the controller wires. Removing the screws and moving the controller moves the wires away from where it is shorting or pushes the break in the wire to make a better connection. Remove the controller completely and give it and the wires a good inspection...JJ


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## nsoutdoorsman1 (Apr 21, 2016)

Agree with jj,defenitely sounds like a loose connection.


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## wade (Apr 22, 2016)

Yes. Check the wires and connections. Try moving the wires while it is switched on to see if one in particular causes the unit to switch off. Be careful though when you do that.


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## pbrown86 (Apr 22, 2016)

Thanks guys.  I will take a look. Do you assume the issue is close to the controller since that is the only place I have access to the wires?


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## chef jimmyj (Apr 22, 2016)

Most likely since moving the controller temporarily fixes it...JJ


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## hangin1 (May 14, 2016)

Yea I have the same smoker and have the same problem. I called masterfully and they sent me a new digital head unit but still got the same problem so I'm thinking my problem is with the internal wiring! If you figure it out let me know because having to worry about the smoker shutting off during a cook sucks! Happy Smoking all!


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## kaiax333 (May 30, 2016)

+1 here

I got my MES for Christmas 2015, done about 6-8 smokes and it's been fine. Most of those were briskets. 

Got up at 4:00AM today to get a nice warm brisket for Memorial Day and worked great for the first 8 hours...then I noticed that it stopped. Unplugged and restarted, unplugged and restarted til it finally stayed. Came back an hour later....shutdown (and losing heat!) 

Did everyone just call Masterbuilt? What was that experience like? 

Much thanks!

kaiax


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## hangin1 (May 30, 2016)

Yea just call masterbuilt and they will probably send you a new heating element or digital head unit. I ended having to buy a new unit but they offered me one at a good price. Good luck and hope you get it fixed up.


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## james95014 (Jul 15, 2016)

I was recently gifted a problem MES 30 with rear controls & window, model #20070411.  It has the random shutdown, shutoff problem

which was never able to be fixed even after multiple control unit changes.  Wanting to get to the bottom of the problem, I took it completely

apart and reverse engineered the electronics.  I discovered that the internal power supply is being overloaded by design.  This and poor

power distribution push it over the edge.  The box is designed with a little power supply and relay board in the bottom that connects via

a long cable to the control unit on top.  The control unit gets +5V power through the cable.  With everything turned on, the little

power supply is overloaded beyond rated capacity.  Then large power demand spikes come in from the control unit and relays which push the

voltage down hard just for an instant.  When the voltage goes down hard enough, the control unit resets itself ending the smoke and

giving you a bad surprise when you wake up.  This is compounded by trying to run power to the control unit through a long thin wire

and no large decoupling capacitors in the control unit.

The whole design is on the edge.  When you call customer service and they send out a new control unit, it's just luck that the new

Control unit + Box combination pulls it back from the edge enough to work.  Over time ageing will push it back over the edge after

you're out of warranty.  That was the experience of my boxes previous owner.  Other symptoms of the problem are shutting down

when changing temperature, changing time or turning on the light.

I worked up a fix that seems to work, add a large capacitor to the control unit.  The capacitor holds the voltage up enough during

brown outs to avoid reset.  It's easy to take the back off the control unit and get to the spot on the board to add the capacitor.  

These pictures show where it is.  I ended up with 1000uF just because I had a bunch laying around.  It just needs a big cap.  

You can get caps on ebay.  To get a little more soldering room to attach the cap leads, scrape some of the green coating off the

board to expose bare copper.  The left lead is Ground, the right is +V.  A 10V or higher capacitor is fine.  













MVC-627F.JPG



__ james95014
__ Jul 15, 2016


















MVC-628F.JPG



__ james95014
__ Jul 15, 2016


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## cmayna (Jul 15, 2016)

To make life very simple for ya', you might consider modifying you MES with an Auber PID.

It basically involves,  disconnecting the current wire to the heating element and connect a power cord directly to the element.  Once done, you plug the new power cord to the Auber unit and go from there...... Never looked back [emoji]128526[/emoji]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## blathnac (Jul 18, 2016)

Same kind of thing here for me.  After disconnecting and reconnecting the wires under the control it has been working.  Although I smoked a couple pork shoulders last night and when I came out to spritz and foil it was hot.  I noticed smoke coming out from under the control panel.  I moved the control panel and saw that smoke was coming out of the hole the wires go into.  Smoker well on its way to 300 so I turned it down to 100 and moved the meat to the oven in the house.  Came back outside and the element is still glowing red hot even after I set it to 100.  So I turn it off and watch to see if the element starts to cool.  It doesn't.  Still glowing red hot.  So I decide to disconnect both wires of the control unit and the element won't turn off.  It doesn't turn off until I unplug the power.  Looks like I'll be calling Masterbuilt.


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## johnmeyer (Jan 26, 2017)

James95014 said:


> I was recently gifted a problem MES 30 with rear controls & window, model #20070411.  It has the random shutdown, shutoff problem
> 
> which was never able to be fixed even after multiple control unit changes.  Wanting to get to the bottom of the problem, I took it completely
> 
> ...


[edit]see my later post below before you do anything

I realize this is an old thread, but I just wanted to thank James. I could have posted exactly the same thing he did (including the fact that this is a gifted, used unit). I searched the web and found that this model has dozens (perhaps hundreds) of identical complaints, including several YouTube videos that demonstrate exactly what James described.



That is not my video, although it is the identical MES and the problem is precisely the same thing I am experiencing.

I too am an EE and after taking apart the controller on top of the smoker, it was clear that it was fine and very unlikely to be the culprit. In addition, every single description of this problem has the same key piece of information: _sometimes it works_. This puzzled me at first: why would it work sometimes and not others? Why would it sometimes fail, without even turning on the heating element? For instance, I could sometimes get it to fail simply by turning on the light!

I didn't want to open up the power supply at the bottom of the smoker, since it is riveted shut, but found a good photo on this site. It looked pretty basic. I at first thought perhaps there was some sort of ground-sensing circuitry (since there have been so many ground issues with MES units), but that didn't seem likely, and the failure mode didn't seem to correlate with anything having to do with ground.

I then hooked up a volt meter to the power leads on the controller board and got only 4.8 volts (5.0 volts is a common standard). As I did various things, I saw the voltage go up and down a little. I probably should have put my scope on it to see how much AC ripple was present.

Bottom line: I was starting to come to the same conclusion, namely that the power supply was pretty small and very remote and that the combination of these two things meant that whenever something happened to cause a voltage drop (pretty much any button press), the local voltage on the board dipped enough to shut off power from the digital chips, causing them to reset.

Thus, a large capacitor might solve the problem by providing a larger amount of reserve energy, for a few milliseconds, whenever a pulse of current is needed.

Thanks to James, I have confidence that this might actually do the trick. I'll write back tomorrow and let you know if this fixed the problem.

[edit] The fix appears to be working. I used a 470 uF 25V cap. I desoldered and then took out the old cap because the extra 100uF isn't really needed. I then used its mounting holes to install the new capacitor. This avoided having to add wires on top of other components. I placed the cap over to the right of the circuit board and hot-glued it to the plastic chassis. I'm a little concerned about the hot glue melting, so I'm going to add a little epoxy or RTV (depending on what I have on hand).

[edit2]Here's a photo of the installed fix. I used a little epoxy to supplement the hot glue. I covered both the leads and the cap itself in heat shrink tubing, just in case it were to break free (unlikely, especially since it is trapped above by the bottom cover, once it is put back on). You'll see two wires coming from each lead of the cap because the only wire I had on hand was 30 gauge, which is a little small to handle the current. So, I used two wires instead of one.













MES%20Controller%20Fix_zpssbjxi3aa.jpg



__ johnmeyer
__ Jan 27, 2017


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## johnmeyer (Jan 31, 2017)

Well, I fired up the smoker today, and the controller is back to its old tricks. So, the fix did not work.

Masterbuilt is sending a new controller (their customer support sure is amazing). I'll see if that helps. If it doesn't then the next step is to re-do the power supply in the riveted box at the bottom of the smoker.


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## barryvabeach (Feb 1, 2017)

Thanks for posting the update ,  it may help others in the same place,  Sorry the fix didn't work for you, but hope you get it sorted out.  If all else fails, it is pretty easy to wire a third party controller like an auber  or even a  diy controller for around $60


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## johnmeyer (Feb 1, 2017)

barryvabeach said:


> Thanks for posting the update ,  it may help others in the same place,  Sorry the fix didn't work for you, but hope you get it sorted out.  If all else fails, it is pretty easy to wire a third party controller like an auber  or even a  diy controller for around $60


Thanks. I haven't read many of the diy controller threads because the idea always seemed wrong. Most of them were oriented toward reducing the temperature swings, but it seems to me that if you reduced the temp swings to only 1-2 degrees, the chip loader would never get really ripping hot (except while initially getting up to temp) and therefore the chips wouldn't smoke very well. I've always thought that the big temperature swings were intentional, by design.

Of course, like many people, I know use the AMNPS for my smoke, but for those who still use the chip loader, I would think the fancy controller might not be a good idea.

If I do end up building my own controller, my understanding is that all I have to do is figure out which pair of leads is the sensor; which is the control for the relay; and which is power (already have that figured out). I guess someone has already posted that information.

First thing is to see if the new controller fixes things.


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## monstaroo (Feb 5, 2017)

I had some issues with the smoker shutting off or getting too hot even after MB replaced my control panel.  My solution was to buy a tappecue.  It has four probes and I can set my chamber temp probes to alert my phone (very loud) if they go above or below the temperatures I set.  This way if my smoker shuts off, I should be woken up or otherwise alerted to get back and check things out.  Because they're on wifi, it doesn't matter if I tin to the store, I can still monitor temps real time.  But yes, they're expensive... And yes, a battery back up on the tappecue and your modem/router is needed if you want protection against power outages.


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## johnmeyer (Feb 5, 2017)

Masterbuilt sent me a replacement controller. I've done three smokes, and I've had no problems. The temperature setting is off, but I simply use my Maverick to tell me the correct temperature, adjust the MES temp setting accordingly, and all is good.

As others have noted in these forums, Masterbuilt's support is amazingly good. I wrote back to them thanking them, and promised to spread the word about their support.


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## blakshukvw (Apr 19, 2017)

I'm having the same issue. On my second controller. I'm interested in doing this mod listed above but I'm no electrician. 
I've also looked into pid controllers but they pretty expensive. Can anyone point me in a direction of an affordable pid controller?


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## avfordguy (May 3, 2017)

If you leave the cover plate off the back wires will not overheat.
I got a PID controller off of tomtop dot com its a heating only PID for $10.05 sorry dont have the part#
Go to amazon and order2 type k thermocouples for 6 bucks and a solid state relay 25amp with 3-32 v dc control, and o ly other thing you will need is a small power supply that has a dc output, i have less than $20 bucks in it and it works awesome!


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## okanagan (Jun 28, 2017)

I discovered this forum because I am looking for a fix for the same problem. Mine is a 2 year old Elite Sportsman model 20071914 that has about a dozen smokes on it and suddenly yesterday shut itself off and did the click thing when I tried to turn it on again.

I phoned Masterbuilt, great gal on the phone, and ordered a replacement control unit (29.99 for the panel and 11.48 shipping). The customer support gal told me to take off the control unit each time and store it inside the house. Moisture and humidity is the culprit she said. My smoker sits on an outside deck under eaves and with a waterproof cover on it. Not good enough apparently. You'd think Masterbuilt would make the wiring a little more robust since a huge percentage of their units are used outside.

Anyway, good to find y'all and hope my new control panel fixes the problem. I am NOT an electrical fixer and though it is my loss, rewiring stuff ain’t gonna happen by me.


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## okanagan (Jul 3, 2017)

MES Shutoff problem solved?  Dry out the controller thoroughly, inside a house.

I disconnected and removed the defective controller from my Gen I Sportsman Elite. It looks like new.  I put it on an out-of-the-way place on a counter in our kitchen for three or four days just figuring to install the new one I ordered from MB when it arrives.  Out of curiosity yesterday I put the old controller back on.  Voila!  It  worked perfectly.  I smoked a medium sized venison roast for 3 hours and it turned out superb. 

Apparently the slightest humidity shorts out the controller and makes it shut off.  That's essentially what the CS gal at Masterbuilt told me last week.  The controller SHOULD be built to stand normal humidity when on a covered deck or porch, but obviously it doesn't. 

I think I'll keep the new controller and have a spare.


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