Good News - Bad News and some questions

[AirCav]

I tried my first Pork Butt Sunday. I used Alton Brown's pulled pork recipe from the old Good Eats show. Brined a 6 lb bone in pork shoulder for 12 hours. I used the little Coleman cooler in the pictures to do so, that worked well. This was a "test" since I have promised a friend I'll bring pulled pork to his Memorial Day party. I wanted to try an edible experiment since this was my first long smoke in the 3D. Put some Bells Two Hearted Ale in the "water" pan inside the smoker, used the stored pork butt program. Put the pork on at 9AM, everything started out fine, probe temp was 43. Went to Church got back home about 11:30 and the internal temp was about 140F. Probe temp about 100F. After a short time internal temp fell to 132. I had to leave to go to a funeral service so I decided to end the program, program the PID for 225 and run until 5:30 (5.5 hours more).

Got home at 5:30, internal temp showed 172F probe temp about 130F. At 9PM with the internal temp showed to 220 and the probe temp at 160, I decided to shut it down for the night, put the shoulder in the frig (after it had cooled down some). I reheated the pork the following day in the oven to 192 and we had good pulled pork.

Good news - pork was delicious. I have been brining for a long time and swear by it.

Bad news - the temp swing was excessive - fell way too low and the time (13 hours) seems long for a cut that size, just over 6 pounds. I made sure the internal temp probe did not touch the pork, easily cleared it. The probe was very accurate as I tested the temp with my Thermapen instant read and there was 0.1 degrees difference. I cancelled the program because I did not want to potentially stay up all night watching it, I figured the manual setting, given the situation was the best route.

Questions - any idea what might have happened? What I might have done wrong, etc.  Should I have let the pork warm up a bit? It started at 43 and that means the 3D had to add 147 degrees to hit 190.

No pride here just want to learn.

Thanks

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[DivotMaker]

Mike, weird description of your smoke!  Sorry it didn't go as planned!  Curious... 

Is this your first smoke in the 3D?

Did you season it?  (Looks really clean inside)

Did you use an extension cord, or plug it into the wall directly?

When you say "internal temp," it looks like you are meaning the box temp, not the meat temp, correct?  Most of us refer to internal temp as that of the meat, so I'm just clarifying.

When the temp didn't seem to be acting right, did you try cycling the power on and off?  Auber controllers sometimes get a little glitchy, and a power reset usually resolves it.

The more info, the better, when diagnosing things like this. 

[AirCav]

Thanks for the follow up!

I did season it and this was my 4th smoke in the 3D. Plugged directly into the wall, no extension cord.

Internal temp is the box temp, I said that as I was using the meat probe so I wanted to be able to differentiate between the two temperature readings. I did cycle the power on and off, I used the switch, I did not unplug it.

I didn't mention that I used 5 oz of wood, that seemed to be about right. I got that from the smoking guide