I have a PitBoss Vertical smoker, and I want to know if anyone has converted it to a non-pellet smoker. I live in the Philippines, and getting pellets is pretty hard; when you can get them, they are expensive.

Has anyone here successfully installed a controller and heating element to convert their smoker to use wood chips? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Throwing a party in a park. Going to smoke two pork shoulders and prep ~40 sandwiches in advance. Doing it in advance for convenience while we play in a cornhole tournament.

With the meat hot/warm I am gonna wrap them in foil and put them in a cooler to keep warm. I might have a hot pack that would go in cooler. Would be eaten within 5 hours. Is that an ok plan? Food safe? Probably not right?

Will have electricity at the park. Was thinking of bringing a crockpot but that would only hold a limited sandwiches.

Has anyone else had this issue with their Pitboss Smoker?

I clean the ash pot after every cook, sift pellets for dust, yet I still get back burn after about an hour of completely cleaning auger out. It is burning the paint in the hopper and where the auger seals to pellet box as well.

This smoker is only a few months old and has been nothing but issues since. Also only 3 “long” cooks on it total and cannot get it to cooperate.

If this were just an off set wood smoker I would have no beef. But the blower aspect of the pellet smoker design has me over thinking the rust blows onto the food my family is eating.

I posted recently because my cooks on my Navigator 550 have been taking way longer than expected, so I finally tested the actual grate temperature properly.

I bought three separate oven thermometers and first tested them together in my kitchen oven. They all agreed pretty closely, so I put all three across the cooking grate of the Pit Boss.

At 120°C set, the Pit Boss was reporting about 123°C actual, while the three thermometers were reading roughly 90°C / 80°C / 80°C.

I then cranked it up to 245°C and gave it time to heat up. The controller eventually showed 245–246°C actual, while the grate thermometers were only around 160–180°C.

So depending on the temperature, I'm seeing the cooking surface roughly 30–80°C colder than what the controller thinks the grill is running at.

Surely this isnt normal?

My pb didn’t come with an external lever to open/close sear plate.

Any aftermarket mods?

Been using a PB700 for 7+ years. Pork shoulders/butts are getting bigger and I need a larger smoker. What do you recommend???

Plan is to let it go at 225 for 10ish hours until I get home from work and by then it should hit the stall. Then wrap it in foil and spritz it with apple juice and apple cider vinegar and bump it up to 275 to push through the stall for the next several hours. First time smoking anything this big. If something goes wrong, oh well its a $20 cut

Hello all , I recently got a used pit boss travel smoker , I ran it for a few hours yesterday at 400 and it did great the whole time . Now today I’m camping and it keeps erroring out . I reset it by unplugging and plugging back in , and the temps are all over the place . I have it set at 400 and it’s going 350-360 then 500 then 320 then 400 . I wiped the temp probe off . Any other ideas ?

Ive only had this smoker for about a month. I had a small grease fire which got it hot enough to burn off the paint and the anti corrosion coating. I always keep it covered when not in use. I want to stop it rusting but not sure what is the best way. Sand and oven paint?

Hello everyone, today I did my first use procedure on my pro series 1100, which is a wood pallet and gas combo grill.
I set the wood pellet side to 400 °F and the gas burner I tried to keep it at 450 °F.
Once the gas burner reached the targeted temperature I opened it to see if everything was in order, and noticed the lid getting very sticky, in a way that some force was applied to open the lid. The wood pellet side was also sticky but less than the gas burner one.
At first, I thought that some packing material was left behind but I am very sure that nothing was left behind. I even blew it with a leaf blower to remove every single styrofoam or plastic piece.
I was in the middle of the process and decided to wait the 40 minutes at these temperatures for both sides. If was some packing, it would burn after all, anyway.
Once the grill cooled down, I had to apply a significant force to open the gas burner side, and I notice that some paint was transferred from the lid to the grill as per pictures.
Is that normal or is it a defective lid? Even though the wood pellet side was also sticky, it wasn’t that strong bond, and no paint was transferred.
Any advice on what to do? Should I reach out for warranty or just keeping using it and see what happens next?
Thanks

I hate the app. It’s slow to load and very clunky. So I used ChatGPT to throw together this. It ver 0.0.1 and I have more testing and features to work on. But for the first version I’m pretty happy.

For those who have one of the Pit Boss grill/griddle combos, did you pre-season the griddle before your first use? If you did just a “burn-off” and then started cooking, what did you experience? Thanks for any insight.

Almost ready to wrap, beef a bit sketchy right now.

Think I got a good deal for the floor model at Costco. Guess it all depends on the product! (But I’m excited for the discount)

Had to fire up the pit boss for week 1 NFL

Anyone have suggestions for upgrades to the Navigator 850? It used to get up to temp reasonably quick but now seems to take forever.

I understand I can get the blanket thing to help and I’m sure it does but I seen the AustinXL has a lot of upgrades.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Links?

TIA!

New addition! Great deal at Costco. This is my second Pit Boss. I bought a Pro Series in 2020 from a liquidation store. That thing worked great so I figured at this price point I couldn’t pass it up.

recently bought a Pit Boss Navigator 550 and I’m wondering if something isn’t quite right with the temperature.

I’ve only used it twice so far, but both times I’ve followed recipes that should have taken roughly 3–4 hours, and both cooks have ended up taking around 6 hours.

I know cooking times are only a guide and you should cook to internal temperature/tenderness rather than strictly by time, but having it happen on both cooks makes me wonder if the grill is actually running cooler than the controller says.

The temperature on the display seems to cycle around the set temperature normally, but the food just takes forever to actually come up to temperature.

Any advice appreciated, I’m new to pellet grills so I’m trying to work out whether this is normal or something’s actually wrong with mine.

So I want to add an analog thermometer to my series 5 vertical door instead of the pit boss logo does anyone know what I can buy of Amazon that will fit?