Has your Traegar ever completely smoked up on preheating and stopped?

[DarienJim]

I have owned my T1300 for two years and probably have 100+ cooks. So I’m pretty familiar with the operation of the Traegar.

Today though something happened I have never seen. I was preheating to 225 with SS when I noticed first the temp, after reaching 175, starting dropping slowing, then I had massive white smoke everywhere coming out of the T1300

My first thought was a fire. I did a manually shut off them got my gloves and slowly opened the top and the amount of white smoke was massive. I lifted off grill, then the shoeld, then the auger protection and saw the auger was completely full and over flowing mostly with unlit pellets but some very partially lit. Someone the auger must have gone haywire and pumped a lot of pellets in there else someone I lost the flame and the pellets just kept came in.

I cleaned them completely out, re-primed the auger and started it back up to 225 SS. I was fully back up and running in 15 minutes.

Pretty scary but curious what could have gone wrong?

Weird thing is early today I heated to 500 and then did proper shutdown so I could scrap the grills with no issues.

 

[Shedd]

I have owned my T1300 for two years and probably have 100+ cooks. So I’m pretty familiar with the operation of the Traegar.

Today though something happened I have never seen. I was preheating to 225 with SS when I noticed first the temp, after reaching 175, starting dropping slowing, then I had massive white smoke everywhere coming out of the T1300

My first thought was a fire. I did a manually shut off them got my gloves and slowly opened the top and the amount of white smoke was massive. I lifted off grill, then the shoeld, then the auger protection and saw the auger was completely full and over flowing mostly with unlit pellets but some very partially lit. Someone the auger must have gone haywire and pumped a lot of pellets in there else someone I lost the flame and the pellets just kept came in.

I cleaned them completely out, re-primed the auger and started it back up to 225 SS. I was fully back up and running in 15 minutes.

Pretty scary but curious what could have gone wrong?

Weird thing is early today I heated to 500 and then did proper shutdown so I could scrap the grills with no issues.

Good to hear it wasn’t anything major and hopefully nothing is damaged. I know all to well how it feels when a grill is on fire. I have close friends involved with a major outdoor company and I tested a Masterbuilt Gravity series smoker/grill. After smoking several rack of ribs we switched over and turned up the heat to grill some chicken breast. As the grill got hot the grease buildup from two previous smokes caught fire. I barely had time to get the chicken off and pull the grill away from the building before the flames took over. It eventually burned out but I’m just glad it didn’t happen on someone’s porch or something. Scary feeling.

 

[RayClem]

There are some stories of hot gases exploding in similar situations. It looks like you responded properly to the situation.