Yoder Smokers Community Forum

So we were cooking a backyard event Saturday for a children's charity. Fired up the Yoder and set my temp to 225 as usual. Cooker came up to temp fine, we loaded the meat. All systems were running normally until about 1 1/2 hours into the cook, we lost power. So I unplugged the cord from the cooker, scrambled to the circuit breaker on the power pole, checked, and it was not tripped, but we still had no power. So I unplugged the power cord on the pole, and ran through the test/reset on the outlet, reconnected the power to the pole, wallah once again had power to the cooker. Our cord was the only cord plugged into this outlet, there were 4 other outlets, but they were all dead, plus other outlets that were in use. Powered the unit back on, set my temp back to 225, the display immediately read 198 and indicated it was ramping up the temp. However, the cooker would NEVER settle back in to 225, it ran more in the area of 290 - 315.

Fearing that the dirty power we were obviously receiving after the "hit" had ruined something. I got home Sunday morning and cleaned the ash out and smoked a spatchcock chicken. I set the temp to 225, and she purred like a kitten the entire cook.

Anyone have any similar experiences cooking with a dirty power feed? Whatever the problem was, it had the controller going batsh!t crazy for the remainder of our cook. It ran fine on my clean house power.

Yes. I made a battery box with 2 type 27 deep cycle batteries and a power inverter. Using this, we never have a power problem anymore when cooking away from home.

Great idea Herb. I am gonna look into that.

I competed with pellet cookers from 2004 till 2012.
Power was often an issue.
The battery/inverter setup works great!

Then I found a "like new" Yamaha 1000W generator on Craig's List for $300 which served me well over the years. Plenty of power to run multiple pellet cookers, some lights, and my precious radio.

Sold it for $300 when I "retired".

Just my experience.

TIM

Thanks KAPN. I have had my eye on a Yamaha EF2400 generator for a while now. I have two devices that absolutely are required at a comp, my cooker, and the cooler radio. Priorities!!