Yoder Smokers Community Forum

First I want to say I absolutely love my YS640!!

I do however have a future design suggestion...

When grilling steaks, etc... and getting the temp up to 500 degrees or more to sear, the one thing I noticed was that the hopper wall connected to the main smoker body gets extremely hot for obvious reasons. This in turn makes the pellets inside the hopper quite warm as well. The last thing I would want to happen is for the pellets to ignite due to heat dissipation from the main smoker body

Perhaps, placing some sort of heat diffuser between the hopper and smoker body would make sense to keep the pellets in the hopper cool?

I'm going to offer my thoughts here. I'm no engineer, so I could be way off, but here is why I feel the design works well and doesn't require a change.

If you open your hopper lid you will see that there is a 1-1/2" gap between the hopper wall and the cooker wall. That offers air space. Air is a great insulator, so that gives you three layers for that heat to go through, the 10 gauge steel body, 1-1/2" of air, and the 14 gauge hopper wall. Plus, pellets take a lot of heat to ignite, so you have to have a pretty massive heat source to make that happen. Do they get warm, sure they do, why wouldn't they, but I don't feel it's enough heat to ignite them.

Also, notice on the hopper where it meets the cooker, there are vents on the front and back. That is going to take some of that heat away from the cooker, further helping the pellets not to ignite. The fan that is mounted to the outside hopper wall where the air intake is will force air out of those vent holes.

Anyone from Yoder, please jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the way I see it. I've never worried about that happening in over two years of Yoder ownership and somewhere between one to two tons of pellets burned. Plus, Yoder has sold thousands of these and if it was a problem, I'm sure it would have been It's probably one of the very last things on my mind.

With the air space it's not an issue. Besides the wall would have to glow RED HOT to ignite any pellet. It never gets anything near that.

Thanks for the input. I orginally considered the heat that is generated at grilling temperatures. The reason this was left in its current configuration is the auger tube stays in the air flow produced by the fans. This keeps the tube at acceptable levels and provides great thermal reductions.

I've noticed that I have to frequently push pellets toward the center of my hopper during a smoking session on my ys640. I was wondering if the interior of the hopper was designed more cylindrical like a funnel if that would result in a smoother flow of pellets into the auger?