Well, less than 20lbs, I'd guess 18-19 as the hopper was not full when I started this cook... pretty frugal consumption here with wind, wildly varying ambient temps and intermittent cloud cover, rock solid 225 average temp (I had a 2 hour run at 250 during this cook and ran a bit at 200 as well). At 33 hours and 14 minutes it finally dropped to 215.
Considering the gold standard is 1lb per hour I think the MAK did ok here
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Greg, my Pit Boss Copperhead 5 is advertised to hold enough pellets for a 48 hr. cook. The hopper is about 4” deep, front to back, and the entire width and height of the smoker body. I could easily put two 20# bags of pellets in it and believe it probably could run for 48 hrs. on a low temp cook. I’ll let you know if I ever test that out. 🙄
the MAK hopper is 20lbs, 48 hours on 40lbs sounds reasonable for a vertical smoker. Though both my friends with Pit Boss pellet grills run through pellets at 225 and above at closer to 2lb than 1lb per hour, and a third one gets almost 1lb per hour.
I once saw a hopper run, actually it was sorta hop/runnin cuz it was a hopper and his ears sorta flopped and were really big so it limited his hoppin ability. Yes, he ran fifty feet until he ran into the weeds n’ disappeared until my dog sniffed him out and he hopped out the other end of the weed patch n’ started runnin/hoppin again. He ran across the road into another weed patch and I never saw him again. He was one fast runnin hopper. He had a big white bushy tail to but that’s not what this post is about.
Well my new LSG pellet grill that will be built starting tomorrow will have a 40lb hopper.
The first thing I will do when I get it, is a 6hr burn-in.
I will place marks in the hopper at 1lb intervals so I should be able to get a fairly accurate rate of consumption during the burn-in.
Of course different grills, different set temps, and different ambient temps will affect consumption rate.
Would be a lot of work to come up with a table for set temps and ambient air temps for all seasons.
However I will be doing the test just out of curiosity since I have to do the burn-in anyway.
Personally I feel it's important to have an estimated burn rate, and the only way to really do that for sure is one long run in summer and one long run in winter. I suspect the LSG will be almost as frugal as the MAK once it gets up to initial temp, also with the LSG you don't have to really account for whats in the auger since it's a short run to the burn pot compared to most other pellet grills. I can run for 30+ minutes on an empty hopper because how long the auger is on the MAK.
My MAK 2 Star hopper holds 20lbs of pellets. That's what MAK says and I have tested it. Yes, it holds 20lbs of pellets. I have done cooks of up to 14 hours with maybe close to 1/4 or so of the hopper still full. Not sure of the limit of the cook time possible and the set point of the cook will be a factor. My 14 hour cook was at 240. It probably could have gone another 4-6 hours or so based on the pellets still in the hopper. YMMV.
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