Flame Boss 300

[skalls]

I've been meaning to write about this for awhile but I wanted to get a few cooks under my built before ranting about how awesome this piece of tech is.  The Flame Boss 300 is a temperature controller for a smoker.  Basically it comes with a fan that you hook up to the lower vent and 2 thermometers.   One of which clips to the grate and the other gets shoved into the meat (you can buy y adapters and monitor up to 3 meat temps at the same time).  The main controller is the brains and based on the temperature it's getting at the grate tells the fan to blow in air to maintain the temperature you want.  It isn't cheap ($330US), but the plus side is you can maintain a set temperature throughout the life of the cook.  There is less likelihood of major  temperature swings.  This is advantageous because when you drop big money on lamb or brisket you want to be able to cook the meat consistently and not end up with waste time, money and food.  

So the picture below shows the brains of this operation.  You can cycle through the menus and do this or that to it, but I've found that it's just easier to control everything through their web page.  It does need to be connected to AC power so eventually I'm going to have to MacGuyver a weather proof container for this thing.  For now I'm only using it when it's not going to rain.

The fan is held in place by gravity through an adapter you slide around the bottom vent.  Unlike several other temperature controllers, this is a variable speed fan.  So when the brain tells it to blow air in at 37%, it can do just that.  Other controllers' fans are basically on or off, so they can at times blow more air into the fire pit than is needed.  This is one of the reasons why I wound up choosing this product as it's much more precise than others.  They do have adapters for other types of smokers as well.  Since I have a kamado this is the one i needed.

And here are a couple pictures of the full setup.

 

Hooking it up to my wifi network at home took about 3 minutes, something other controllers isn't nearly as easy, and then it takes another minute to register your controller at their website.  If i wanted too I could get a fire started before work, control it on my phone through their website and then have something tasty when I get home.  I won't be doing that because I'd rather be at home when there's a fire (controlled as it may be).  But you can manage the controller anywhere you have internet access.  This is another benefit that this controller has over the others, you don't need to setup port forwarding (which isn't hard but can be tricky).

And this is the screen you get when you log in.  I'm an analyst by trade so I geeked out so much over seeing this lol.  The blue line is my set temperature, red line is the bit temp, green line is the % the fan is running and orange is the meat temp.  I learned that I let the pit get up to 150 or so before hooking this stuff up.  I believe this is an image from one of my first cooks using it.  Once it gets to temp it stays +/- 1 degree.

It can also detect when the lid is open.  When that happens you can set a delay on it to not blow air in for a period of x minutes (my setup is 3 minutes).  THis prevents the fire pit from getting to hot.

But I love this thing.  It's sped up my beer can chicken cook by over an hour, probably speed up the pork butt cook time by 2 hours (testing that now as we speak) and all told the meat I'm smoking and grilling has come off the grill more moist and flavorful.

Here's the pork butt I'm doing today.

[playindirty]

Awesome right up ,now if they made the probes connect wireless to the brains that would be even better.

[polarbear]

I'm slowly writing a shopping list of all the grill toys I need for my Kamado cooks

A pit controller is on that list. I'm not sure if i'll go with the Flame Boss or wait for the Smobot to hit the market later in the year
Either way, I love the idea of being able to put my brisket on the night before and sleep soundly knowing it'll be ready for lunch the following day

Great review

[shall]

Great write-up, thanks.