Major fire in burn pot

[Annieandtheboz]

We purchased a PBV3P1 vertical smoker at the beginning of the summer and have really not had a lot of luck getting it work successfully without a lot of fiddling around and babying it. It’s been quite a disappointment to be honest. The latest issue is a major fire in the burn pot whenever we light it, either automatically or manually. The flames are about a foot high and even when we close the door and leave it in smoke mode the flames just continue to burn and we never really get any smoke Nor does the fire got out. We’ve cleaned and vacuumed out the burn pot every time before use so it’s clean with nothing stuck in the burn pot. Any suggestions on what the problem might be? We will try calling Pit Boss customer service I guess but wondered if anyone had any ideas on what we’re doing wrong.

 

[MikeInFla]

Do you have the heat shield and water pan in place? With the heat shield in place over the burn pot it should not do that.

 

[Annieandtheboz]

Thanks for responding. The flame was really high without the heat shield and water pan in place so we put them in and the flames were then coming out the sides. Is this normal? Then once we did that (put the heat shield and water pan in place) and raised the temp to 350 and closed the door to preheat we got an erH error code after about 10 mins.

 

[MikeInFla]

Does the auger feed continuously? erH means it got too hot. Always put the heat shield and water pan (with water) in place whenever using the vertical smoker. I have the series 3 myself. Check to see if the auger is always running, if that is the case then it may be wired backwards which is a common problem with these units. I assume yours is new and has always done this? Check the wiring diagram inside the manual and see how it is wired. Also call customer service and leave a call back number and maybe they can help out. If there are any bad parts they will ship out new ones free. I think it might be a wiring issue but it could also be a bad control panel. Disappointing I know but a lot of these don't work out of the box (not just vertical, pellet grills in general). I got lucky, I have never had issues with mine.

 

[Annieandtheboz]

No The auger it doesn’t feed continuously I don’t think. It cycles off and on. I did take your advice and called customer service. They called me back and offered several suggestions including a different start up procedure (start at 200 degrees with the inside components in place and the door open then when the flame catches shut the door and leave for 5 mins then set to desired temp), cleaning the temperature probe, moving the water pan farther away from the heat shield and perhaps changing out the pellets. She seemed to think it was either an air flow or pellet quality problem. They did offer though that if we continue to have problems to call them back and they may need to send us a new control panel. Well give it another shot and see what happens. Will post the results. Thanks again for the advice and support!