This video nails my experience. I have struggled on and off with my Timberline 850 since I got it a few years ago. Occasionally my Timberline would work great, keep a very steady temperature and was truly set it and forget it. Other times I had really bad problems of wild temp swings, sometimes fine at the start, then halfway through see steady decline in temp, almost looking like it had shut down and subsequently the temp skyrocketing past my set temp and going up a few hundred degrees higher. Most recently I was trying to smoke at a very low temp (165F) with some brand new off Amazon Traeger Cherry Pellets and had swings of over 200F (like down to 135F then skyrocketing back up to 350F (basically destroying my smoked meat). I called Traeger Service and the tech suggested maybe a new Thermocouple might address the issue. I replaced it and did a test, using the Traeger Cherry Pellets. During the test, I saw billowing smoke coming from the pellet hopper and pulled the power plug. I knew fire was heading up the auger toward the hopper, if not already in the hopper. After it quit smoking, I emptied the hopper (the fire had just gotten up into the bottom pellets of the hopper). I then took the auger motor off and removed the auger and all the burned pellets in the auger tube. I the cleaned the auger tube out and realized I must have had a ton of sawdust along the auger tube and must have been caused by bad pellets. Unfortunately I had already thrown the bad Cherry pellets away before I called Traeger support to see if they thought my conclusion of bad pellets might be right. They asked me to inspect the pellets and do a few tests, but I had thrown them away. I then went down and bought new Traeger Hickory pellets at my local Ace Hardware (they looked very shiny, had hard snap to them and almost no sawdust in the bag). I put my Timberline 850 back together and did a test with the new pellets. The smoker worked as well as it ever has in the past. I am 100% convinced when my Traeger has worked well in the past, I had excellent pellets and when it didn't work well, I had bad pellets. BTW, I have only used Traeger pellets, so don't assume a bag of new Traeger pellets is going to be great. I am not buying the online anymore. I am buying them from my local Ace where I know they have only gone through the shipping mill once and then stacked on a shelf and where I can see them before I buy them, assuring they look shiny, hard and very little sawdust in the bag. I am also going to clean my hopper and auger tube once a season getting any sawdust left inside cleaned out. My bet is my Traeger will work fine from now on, as long as I maintain it as above and used fresh perfect pellets.

Traeger and their distributors love to deflect responsibility to the customer and this video is no exception. I’ve owned a Traeger for many years and it almost never performs well. They love to blame the pellets and from my experience the pellets have never been the problem. Today I called Traeger for more troubleshooting and the wait was one to two hours. Yea right “set it and forget it…by the curb”!

Dumped fresh Treager hickory pellets in my clean Treager on a hot summer day, and on high it didn’t even get to 300 degrees. Ridiculous.

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Empty the hopper every time you are done cooking. Why take the risk when it is so easy to do ?

One more thing about Traeger pellets ... they suck and continually rank low in comparison tests. Also normally more expensive.