electric smoker, well mine, anyway, does not run great when it's this cold outside, even if it is out of the wind. has to work too hard and temperature fluctuates too much. worse still when it's over loaded with large pieces of meat. I've wrapped it up in old sleeping bag on cold nights before, which helped minimally. I've been scheming to make a box to completely encase the entire smoker. got around to it yesterday after I started smoking bellies yesterday. I have some large sheets of 4 ply cardboard that is about 1/2" thick. I made a four sided box with a double thickness lid. made a huge difference in how well the temperature stayed steady. I have always figured that insulating the top of the smoker better would help a lot in keeping the cabinet temp stable and I proved it last night. what should have taken 20-24 hours took 14 hours running the smoker as close to 135* as I could keep it, and bellies went a few degrees above where I would have liked, but still well below the point of rendering any fat. cabinet temperature barely fluctuated more than 10 degrees after the first few hours of operation, after I covered the smoker with cardboard, and it was 20 degrees outside for most of this smoke. I don't like dealing with smoker at 2am, but that's what I did. 8 hours of smoke and only 6 more hours to reach 130, which a little more than the 127 I was shooting for. bellies were probably up to temp in 12 hours, an hour and a half after I went to bed. encasing smoker in insulation with a couple of inches of dead air space blocks any wind and holds heat considerably better than without. I cut a few rashers to sample after it chilled a few hours outside this morning. nice batch of bacon.
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