Spent 4 hours chasing a temp swing on my offset smoker

I've been using this 20 gallon offset for maybe 6 months now and kept getting these wild temp swings every time I added a split. Yesterday I finally realized the issue. My firebox door was warped just a tiny bit and letting in extra air whenever I opened the cook chamber. Took a pair of vice grips and clamped it shut, and bam, steady 250 for 3 hours straight. Has anyone else dealt with a warped door on a cheaper offset?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_james5d ago

Man, that warped door thing is a killer. I had a similar issue with a cheaper pit where the latch just wasn't holding tight enough, so I ended up using a stack of fireplace bricks to weigh down the lid. It worked okay, but then I got this whole new problem where the bricks would heat up and start cracking if I left them on too long. Ended up having to swap them out every cook until I finally just bent the latch with a hammer to get a tighter seal. Your vice grips trick is probably way more reliable than my whole brick situation.

gibson.robert5d ago

Wait, is this REALLY that big of a deal? I get that a warped door is annoying, but I feel like you went from zero to sixty pretty fast with the whole fireplace brick situation. @the_james, you could have just thrown a couple of cinder blocks on the thing and called it a day instead of cracking bricks left and right. Honestly, bending the latch with a hammer sounds like the kind of fix that works fine until it doesn't, and then you're REALLY stuck. Vice grips are a solid stopgap, but I'm not sure any of this is worth losing sleep over.