I do not know who Traeger is. I do know that this goes 10x farther than their advertisements. If you were my customer, I would GIVE you 2 smokers and every accessory that is available, to change your derogatory feelings (not that you are wrong, on the contrary, you are right) but that's what a stand-up business does. Make this guy tell everyone how GREAT they are.
I would NEVER buy their product based on your experience. A good copy of this thread should be sent to them. Maybe then, they will see the errors of their ways.

Although I have never used a “pellet” smoker/ grill I cannot say enough good things about my Kamado Joe. EXCEPTIONAL customer service from the forums, I have never needed them. They are just GREAT!!

Ditto on the Savannah Stoker control. We purchased a Traeger thru QVC about four years ago. The unit is about 525 sq. in or so. The mechanicals worked fine, but the temp varied widely and we had a few "explosions" when it would flame-out and then re-lite. I was ready to throw it away, but purchased the Savannah Stoker control as a last resort. That was about 2-1/2 years ago and has fixed my issues.

With the replacement control I can program the entire smoke/cook/hold cycle, allowing the unit to run continuous, with the only infrequent need of making sure the bin still has pellets. It comes with a temp probe and will switch from cook to hold automatically when it hits your programmed temp.

Traeger has changed their designs and models over the past few years, with some working better than others. If not for the Savannah Stoker control I would have ditched mine a long time ago. I have been thinking about upgrading to their Ironwood 885 to get a bigger unit, but am afraid I may still need to upgrade the control.

By the way, what model do you have?

Doug

quote:

Originally posted by mark_a:

quote:

Originally posted by esdunbar:
I’ve recommended Traegers in the past as I have loved mine. Recently mine overheats (temp spikes) and it shuts itself off.

What brand of pellet smoker would y’all recommend. I don’t really have a budget per say, but around $2k seems reasonable. I know some are up around $4k-$5k but I’m no master BBQ’er so that just seems overkill for me. Thanks.

There is a simple fix for this. Get thee one of these and install it. It is a far superior controller and with the auto-relight really fixes all of teh major issues with the Traeger controller.

I've had a Traeger for 12 years. I put various pid controllers on it but never had any interest in really finishing them. This guy did and he worked with a bunch of very dedicated pellet smokers to get it dialed in. I've had mine for maybe 4 years and it is still going strong.

That Traeger is now relegated to back up duty mostly because I bought the smallest and decided I needed more real estate. I ended up with A RecTec 700, cheesy handles and all. I like it very much. I studied the Yoder which I really like a lot, and the Green Mountain grills a lot.

The Green Mountain is what I suggest to my smoker pretender friends. It is very forgiving and has a great feature set for the money. I think you will be happy with any of those but I really urge you to consider the upgraded controller first.

https://www.savannahstoker.com/

Mark

quote:

Originally posted by sybo:
Although I have never used a “pellet” smoker/ grill I cannot say enough good things about my Kamado Joe. EXCEPTIONAL customer service from the forums, I have never needed them. They are just GREAT!!

I had an opposite experience. While the customer service was great, after 6 months of use one of my ceramic heat deflectors cracked in half for their most popular size the classic II 18"?. They didn't have it in stock, I waited almost 2.5 months until I received a set of them, which ironically the day after I received them my second original heat deflector cracked. To their credit they did send me a 10lb bag of smoking wood of my choice for free. But almost 2.5 months to wait for a ceramic heat deflector really rubbed me the wrong way. 4-6 weeks I would have been ok with.

I do love the Kamado joe grill and it's features much better than BGE. It's also much better than my previous weber gold kettle, although the weber kettle was a lot faster from lighting the charcoal in a chimney, and dumping the coals in and cooking 5 mins later. I use B+B lump oak in the KJ and a torch to start it, but takes twice as long to get started and then get up to temp. I use the grill quite often (3x per week at least). It does a very good job smoking and I put a aluminum pie tin with water on top of the ceramic grates. BUT, it doesn't hold a candle to my Weber smokey mountain dedicated smoker as far as smoking goes in the way the food comes out (taste and texture). But it also doesn't have the 30 mins of clean up the weber smokey mountain has.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
Just an FYI though, 2016 or 2017 LINKEDIN had a data breach that involved the hackers getting passwords for those accounts. If you are going this route I would suggest another email address.

Well, unless you enjoy getting multiple emails a week from scammers stating that they have hacked your computer and watched you visiting porn sights all the while they have turned on the video camera in your computer and have a video record of you and your actions. Oh, and for a "donation" in Bitcoin they will delete all the evidence and not ruin your reputation.

That just happened to a friend of mine, he said the emails just keep getting worse from these folks on what they will do,

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:

That just happened to a friend of mine, he said the emails just keep getting worse from these folks on what they will do,

I find them in my spam folder where they are routed automatically. I just delete the folder each day without opening any of the messages there.