Pellet Smoker Energy Use

As promised, here's my test on how much battery power it takes to smoke two racks of ribs for 6 hours...

I’m serious about eating. And luckily I’m pretty fair on a grill or pellet smoker. So last Sunday I offered to experiment with smoking two racks of ribs on my Z Grills smoker. And since I have a lot of test gear and solar batteries, I decided to power it from a Jackery Explorer 1000 with a 100-watt solar panel.

Just the smoker…

This is a basic Z Grills pellet smoker the boys bought me for Christmas two years ago. I think it was a hint that they wanted me to smoke some meat!

Heat ‘em up

All of these modern pellet smokers have a heating element to get the fires started. In this case it needed around 194 watts for several minutes. Note that the Jackery Explorer 1000 outputs 110 volts rather than a full 120 volts, so there would be a bit more wattage drawn if you used a Solar Generator with a 120-volt AC output.

The meats

My wife found a BOGO deal (Buy One Get One Free) on ribs at the store last week, so that was the plan for the Sunday smoking experiment.

How much solar/battery power is needed?

These smokers use very little electricity while running. As you can see, my Z Grill only needs 35 watts to run the auger and electronics. And after 6 hours of operation it used a total of 0.21kWh (KiloWatt Hours) of energy which is 210Wh (Watt-Hours) of battery power. The Jackery 1000 has a capacity of around 1000Wh of battery storage, so even without a solar panel I could easily repeat the smoking cycle at least 4 to 5 times. With a 100-Watt solar panel and reasonable sunshine, I could easily smoke ribs every day forever. Or at least until I run out of pellets and meat!

3-2-1 Smoking

I’ll publish the recipe later, but I used something called a 3-2-1 smoking method for ribs. It was 3 hours smoking at 225 degrees with the ribs bone-side down on the grate, then 2 hours at 275 degrees with the ribs wrapped up tight in aluminum foil, and up to 1 hour at 275 degrees with the foil removed to dry out the bark a bit. I liked what the ribs looked like with a final 20 minutes in the smoker rather than 1 hour, so go with what you like.

The Recipes

As I’ve hinted at before, my wife Linda is a retired catering manager and a fabulous cook, plus my son Kevin is a Culinary Institute graduate with a baking and pastry degree who teaches at the local Tech High School. I’m the grill master, but Kevin’s twin Mark is really good at it as well. They’ve all offered to share their quick and affordable recipes and cooking/baking techniques with you if there’s any interest.

How about the FunkWorks Kitchen?

Should I start publishing a side SubStack with our favorite recipes? Please leave your comments below.