As promised, this turned out to be a great week. Let me start out by talking about last Monday.
While Lisa, Alex and his family were at SeaWorld.
I was in the back yard testing the latest version of my smoker. I think I finally have a stable and safe design that I can either sell or take into production. It has been a long hard road but I’m quite excited that I am now there.
The smoker was running perfectly but the TEG was gradually losing power because I believe I need to reverse the airflow through the heat sink. The way it is now I am blowing hot air from the combustion chamber into the TEG, I need to reverse that.
Finally the TEG voltage dropped to 8 volts and the soft ware is written to recognize that as the fire having gone out and it shutsdown because it thinks it is out of wood pellets. Normally, shutting down when there are still a load of wood pellets in the combustion chamber is how I would get a fire in the hopper. I thought this would be a perfect chance to see what would happen with this newest design where a fire in the hopper should be impossible. It performed admirably well. After I was convinced that there was no way the fire could get to the pellet hopper, I realized that the pellets sitting in the combustion chamber could sit there smoldering for hours so I turned on the blower to burn them up quickly.
This desigin in amazing and has a very intense flame. From ignition to smoking temperatures is less than four minutes. I knew it would burn those pellets up within minutes and everything was operating perfectly so I went back to my office to enter the data into the computer.
Meanwhile, back in my smoker, things were not going as well as I thought they were. The waterjet in my shop has been down for over six weeks so this prototype was kind of cobbled together out of old and modified parts that I had on hand. This left gaps in the combustion chamber where pellets could jump out and possible jets of flame could shoot out. This would never happen in a properly fabricated smoker and even if it did there is no where the burning pellets and flame could go that would be unsafe. This design, however didn’t have a bottom on the smoker and it was operating on a wooden bench top that was sitting on a plastic cart.
Apparantly either a burning wood pellet or a jet of flame (along with plenty of combustion air) ignited the plywood bench top which then ignited the plastic cart and my day went downhill from there.
Meanwhile, back in my office, I was enjoying the results of a perfect test and making plans for further testing when I got a phone call from Angelina asking if I could pick her up from school. I told her that I would be right there. For some reason I walked out to the kitchen where roaring flames out the back window caught my attention. My smoker was fully engulf in flames. I mean flames were shooting out from all four sides of the smoker and shooting at least a foot above the smoker itself.
My first thought was that I wanted to take a picture but this fire was destroying my smoker and it was also dangerously close to my pergola. I ran into the garage, grabbed our fire extinguisher and put the fire out. I was then late picking up Angelina.
It is probably also a good opportunity for me to build a new smoker from scratch incorprating this wonderful new design.
--------------------trivia--------------------
A dead body will some times sit up as it’s being cremated because muscles contract as they cook.
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