Well here's what I did this afternoon. We don't have a garage so I put the smoker in the house and plugged it into the wall w/out an extension cord and stuck a temp. probe into the smoke hole. There was nothing in the smoker, no wood, no racks, nothing, and turned it up to 200 degrees, 10-15 minutes later it was up to 200 on the probe. Next I plugged it into the extension cord (still inside) and did it again, and it worked fine. Than I brought it outside plugged into the extension cord and again turned it up to 200, 20 minutes later the temp probe was up to 220! The ambient temp. was around 25 degrees. It seems to work just fine, so I'm not sure what our problem was. As soon as we get some decent weather we're going to try a turkey and see what happens.