You may be of the opinion that if you need gadgets to control your pit, you don’t know how to control your pit.  I am not of this opinion, so when Flameboss sent me over a Flameboss 400 to try out I was over the moon and could not wait to use it.

Having had the Flameboss for over 6 months I feel I’ve put it through its paces on a number of cooks and can honestly say that I would not want to be without it now.

Pork Butt is a family favorite here in the Edge household.  I’ve made it many, many times and my preferred method is low and slow at 110c (225f for my American friends).  The problem with this method is that for a 5kg shoulder, I’ve had them take up to 24 hours to hit that perfect internal temp, which means smoking overnight.  The first couple of overnight smokes I did were great fun, I loved it, new to smoking, getting up at 3am because the water pan had run out of water and the temperature had risen too high, or the wind had picked up and so the temperature had risen.  No big deal, it was summer, it was warm, it was almost romantic.  But the novelty soon wore off.  I have kids, being tired all day but having an awesome pulled pork sandwich to eat was all well and good but I knew trudging out into a cold and wet January morning at 4am to close the vents down 1/8^th of a turn wasn’t something I was continuing to enjoy.

The Flameboss takes all that guess work out of controlling your pit.  If like me, you are cooking for friends or family, convenience is such a massive benefit.  I’ve no doubt you will have a million and one other things to be doing, sweeping the floor, putting away the lego box that had been upturned for the 4^th time that day, changing a nappy etc etc etc.  Yes, I can control my BBQ.  I’ve had plenty of uneventful overnight cooks where I’ve had no pit alarm to wake me up.  But I remain I would not want to smoke without the Flameboss taking the helm for me now.

So lets talk in a bit more detail about the Flameboss.

It was super easy to install on my Weber Smokey Mountain, took literally 2 mins.  One screw through a vent hole and the stainless dish moulds itself perfectly to the curves of the pit.  The fan control unit then simply hangs in the square hole of the dish by a lip at the top.

Connecting it and setting it up was also a doddle, its all done through the Flameboss app, connecting to my Wifi with no issues and works with no issues about 20m from my router.

When you come to use the Flameboss, you just plug in the temperature sensor and the food sensor, set your desired temps on the app and away you go.  All the automation is done via the Flameboss app which is very easy and intuitive to use.

A nifty graph in the app shows you how much the fan is working, the temp of your pit and the internal temp of your meat.  Its very interesting to see especially with a meat like pork that will stall.

You can leave the house if you need to, the Flameboss app is cloud based so as long as you have a phone or wifi signal, you can control your temp from anywhere in the world.  You can also share a link to a webpage that gets automatically generated to share with your friends and family.

In addition to all this, you can also fully control the flame boss via an apple watch app and through home assistants like Alexa or Google, this is incredibly useful I have found.  Ask Alexa “Alexa, ask Flameboss how my cook is doing” and she will reply with the meat and ambient temperatures, a really great and handy feature.

The app will notify you of a number of things: 

If it detects the lid is open (its super quick to do this too, within less than 10 seconds of opening the lid in my experience)

When it detects the lid is closed again

If the unit loses connection to WiFi

If it detects your lid vent is open too much (this was strange to me as I’ve always had my exhaust vent fully open but the Flameboss works best about 2/3 closed)

If there are any temperature issues (which is super rare, only had this one once when I forgot to turn it all off and a couple of hours later I ran out of fuel).

When your meat has reached the desired temp you get an in app notification and also a text message. 

Software updates seem to be pretty regular from Flameboss too.  Almost every time I turn the unit on I get a notification that the software is updating.  These generally take about 5 mins to complete but this will be dependent on the speed of your WiFi.  The fan still operates during this time and defaults to the temperature set on the previous cook.

I guess its fairly rare you need to change temperature mid way through a low and slow smoke but I have played about to see how quickly temperature changes happen.  This is going to be subjective to your fuel and pit, but in my experience temp changes happen pretty quickly.  To increase from 110c to 120c took about 10 minutes and to come back down to 110c took about 18 mins. 

In the box you get a ambient temperature sensor, a food temperature sensor, the Flameboss variable speed fan unit, a connection kit for WSM type BBQ (Other kits such as a Kamodo kit are available), another adaptor which I have since installed on my UDS, a power adaptor and an instruction booklet.  Everything seems great quality, I’ve used this maybe 20 times now with no issues.  The Flameboss unit itself feels very robust.  The ambient temperature probe has a crocodile clip on the end which is really handy as it clips straight onto your cooking grate, however, this can be a little tricky to feed through the probe grommet on the WSM.

I’ve had once instance of the Flameboss loosing connection to my WiFi (this was down to my service provider, not Flameboss.  I was out at the time and wasn’t a problem at all. The Flameboss continued to monitor the temperature and kept it going at the temp I had set.  Frustratingly, it didn’t automatically reconnect once my WiFi had sorted itself out and I had to restart the Flameboss unit by unplugging it from power.  Not a major issue but maybe something that could be fixed in a future update?

The only other criticism I can really think of is there is not “built in” way of putting out the fire once the cook is done.  I like to reuse charcoal if I can and there is no way to control the BBQ vent that the Flameboss connects too with the dish in the way.  It would be great to see this improved, maybe with a quick release system of the dish, or perhaps a slider on the hole where the Flameboss unit itself fits.  I have got around by plugging the hole with foil, its not very elegant but it works.

All in all I think the Flameboss 400 is a fantastic automatic temperature controller that I highly recommend too anyone who owns a smoker.  It really does make life so easy and means you can relax and not have your pit in the back of your mind all day.  It just works, extremely well.