Electric double smoker.... stainless steel heat & hold oven

[Owly055]

I just finished a double smoker for a friend who owns a restaurant the other day. This was built from a commercial stainless steel heat and hold oven that was burned out. The heating system for the oven originally was about a mile of niachrome wire wrapped around the oven....... the wiring was trashed, as were the contactors, and about everything but the thermostats and the oven itself.

Each oven has two thermostats that are very accurate, a bunch of timers (shot), and various other things. I dismantled two ordinary hot plates, one I mounted through the floor of the upper oven with the connection in the space between ovens. The lower one I had to dismantle the hot plate and replace the plastic with aluminum, and eliminate all the controls, lights, and crap, and feed high temp wiring through a hole in the floor from the connections.

Hot plates are wired into the oven thermostats, with indicator lights to tell you it's running. I replaced the contactors with a board with triacs You can set any of the four thermostats, and control the hotplates.......... all thermostats are wired in........ two for each hotplate..... Only because they were there.

I drilled the doors and put thermometers in them.......... As it turns out the thermostats are very accurate.

Cast Iron skillets will contain wood chips. The hot plates bring the ovens up to temp fairly slowly.......but who cares? The electric heat means that there doesn't need to be much venting............. It's going to be interesting to see how well this works.


Howard

 

[Hello]

That sounds amazing but where are the pics?

 

[Owly055]

That sounds amazing but where are the pics?

It never occurred to me to take pics...... It just looks like a stacked stainless steel restaurant oven with a couple of electric elements in it. When I catch him smoking something in it, I'll shoot some photos.

This is the first smoker I've ever built, I've been dreaming about building an electric grilling setup with a broiler type element under a grate ,and using a separate smoke generator to send smoke up past steaks while grilling. I love just a hint of smoke with a steak. I sometimes grill steaks over charcoal or wood coals, and heap willow or maple leaves on the coals so the sweet smoke billows around the steaks. It does a nice job, but is a bit difficult to control as you have to rake off the burned leaves and add more. I'm into light subtle smokey flavor, not heavy smoke flavor.


H.W.