Grill fire!

[mikefinleyco]

I let the Traeger stay dirty for too long, the wife came along before I could clean it and decided to use it with a recipe that called for 450F temp. Yep, had a nasty fire going during the preheat, grill shut down due to high heat limit reached, temp said got to about 850F before it died down.

Cleaned the grill, including the fire/pellet pot, some of the pellets were scorched in the feeder tube, ran those out to clean pellets. Grill seems to work, a little slight grinding noise from the pellet feeder that I didn't notice before. It seems to me the grill takes longer to ignite now than before, but could be in my head.

Any thoughts or recommendations? Should I replace some parts like the igniter (don't even know if this is a thing or not) just for the heck of it? Did I kill something I don't know about or ruin it's reliability to run safely if doing a smoke over night?

 

[Timmy]

Plan a long cook during the day, run it to cook a pork butt or something. Keep an eye on it. Check it often. If it runs all day without issue. IMO it would be fine to run overnight. Even better is if you have a 3rd party thermometer that has alarms both high and low.

This is just my opinion.

 

[mikefinleyco]

I've smoke a couple of steaks since then, the grinding noise of the pellet screw seems to have lessened, maybe there were some burnt pellets in there. Seems to operate just fine. fingers crossed

 

[TxDuster]

My guess is you warped the auger somewhere along the way. If it lights, the hot rod is okay and only you can tell if it sounds like the auger is doing damage to itself or the feed tube. I would run it as timmy said.. If it's rubbing bad enough I GUESS it could eventually rub a hole in the tube but I'm not sure the dust in the bottom doesn't act as a bit of lubricant. Just my $.02